Language Arts Sites and Resources

Reading Sites

Free flash Games for language, grammar, vocabulary, and phonics practice.
A great site for K-2 students to practice reading skills is Starfall.com. Students can practice letter recognition or work through the Learn To Read books, games, and resources. The site also has support for parents and teachers.
The Universal Design for Learning Book Builder website helps you design books to support reading instruction for all students. Check out their sample books to discover additional questioning strategies. Visit their home page to explore additional resources: http://www.cast.org/index.html
Reading practice for ELL students (Spanish, French, German, Italian, English)
Kathy Diaz and a team of teachers at Stone Ranch have been using Bookadventure.com, a free site sponsored by Sylvan Learning. It allows students to take quizzes on books they read and to earn prizes.
KidsReads.com is like a giant online book club for kids. Share favorite books, write reviews, read reviews, talk about favorite books, series, and authors. Sponsored by Disney.
Another book club for kids can be found at the Random House website for kids. Students can participate in book adventures and activities from "the Magic Treehouse", "Junie B. Jones," "Nate the Great," and other series.
Kids will love Scholastic's new Flashlight Reader's book club. Students read great books and hear authors describe just how they tackle the craft of writing.
Refer to the Author Studies calendar at Scholastic.com to plan for scheduled author chats. For additional resources visit the PUSD Strategies for a Successful Chat web page.
You might consider starting a "Dear America Mother/Daughter Book Club" with other Dear America Mother book fans in your neighborhood or school. Here is a link to the main site for all the activities that accompany the "Dear America Book Series."
Students are often captivated by the works of a specific author, making author studies an exciting adventure in reading. If you didn't find an author on the Scholastic Authors Site, try one of these:
1. Yahooligan's Author Directory
2. Children's Authors and Illustrators on the Web,
3. The HarperCollins.com Author in the Spotlight site
4. The Kids at Random House Author Spotlight site
5. Channel 4's BookBox Website
6. Children's and Young Adult's Authors and
Illustrators,
7. Fairrosa Cyber Library of Children's Literature
Don't miss this year's 2005 Second Read! It will be held on Friday, December 2, 2005.

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Guided Reading

Scholastic.com has an excellent section of teacher training and resources for Guided Reading by Gay Su Pinnell

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Literacy Strategies

Visit the Read-Write-Think website sponsored by the International Reading Associatioin, National Association of English Teachers, and Marco Polo for high quality resources for literacy instruction. You'll find graphic organizers, lesson plans, and online practice tools for students. Be sure to visit the Student Materials section. There is a template for students to create a six page Stapleless Book and the Flip A Chip word study game.
Flip a Chip Instructions | Flip a Chip Game
Stapleless Book Instructions
Stapleless Book Planning Sheet
Stapleless Book Online Generator
Christine Overson at Sundance has done an excellent job of organizing many of the Read-Write-Think activities by skill on the Sundance Language Arts Links page.
Graphic Organizers can be downloaded from Scholastic's site to help students use better strategies to organize and construct meaning as they read.
Scholastic's Skills and Strategies section of the Language Arts pages for teachers provide multiple resources for students to learn and practice literacy strategies. For lesson plans and activities you can search their database by grade level.
Teachers will definitely want to bookmark ReadingLady.com, a site written by a first grade teacher who shares lessons and provides professional resources and information about Reading Workshop, Reading for Meaning - Using Thinking Strategies to Support Independent Reading, Four Blocks and Writing Workshop.

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Word Studies

Match vocabulary words with their meanings and donate rice to help end world hunger.
Word Build and Bank
What's in the Bag? (K-2)
Word Family Sort (Short Vowels)
Picture Match (K-2)
Flip-A-Chip (Affixes & Roots)
Phonics Practice and Chants for Phonemic Awareness instruction for ELL students.

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Word Roots

Quia Game for Greek and Latin Roots | Fact Monster

For student practice of Greek and Latin Roots, visit this Quia site.
Or visit Scholastic's Go for the Gold: It's Greek to Me site to practice Greek word roots at two levels.
The Fact Monster web site has a great article titled "Word Wise" that explains Greek and Latin word roots. It also includes lists of Greek and Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes.

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Online Professional Development Opportunities

Reading Resources Network on Scholastic.com provides "up-to-date research and best practices" to empower teachers and "create readers."
United Streaming ASCD Training Videos. Login to United Streaming with your district provided login and password. Choose "advanced search" and in the publisher column, select: ASCD to view a complete list. Some sample ASCD videos are:
1. How To Improve Your Questioning Techniques
2. Big Book: Word Work (Primary Grades)
3. Reading Workshop: Guided Reading (Primary Grades)
The Pacific Resources for Education and Learning website has a tremendous amount of materials to increase language art and math skills for students from many cultures. You can read an excellent book, Focus on Fluency on this website. You can also search for any of the following tools to help with early literacy instruction: research papers, activities/strategies, assessments, policies, or family and community resources.

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Reading Tools for Parents

First graders from April Payne's class at Highland Ranch School created a great video that includes 6 strategies of great readers that parents can use when helping their children at home.
Print parent newsletters about reading for your students' grade level.
Also be sure to view the many wonderful sites that support reading instruction on the Resources for Families page.
A great site for K-2 students to practice reading skills is Starfall.com. Students can practice letter recognition or work through the Learn To Read books, games, and resources. The site also has support for parents and teachers.
For book lists, reading, writing, math, homework help, and more visit the Links for Learning Adventures Site.

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Online Professional Development for Writing

United Streaming ASCD Training Videos. Login to United Streaming with your district provided login and password. Choose "advanced search" and in the publisher column, select: ASCD to view a complete list. Some sample ASCD videos are:
1. Interactive Writing (Primary Grades)
2. Writer's Workshop (Intermediate Grades)
For great professional articles on writing instruction as well as activities and resources, visit Scholastic's Teaching Writing Page.

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Great Resources for Writing Instruction
For lesson plans and activities you can search the Scholastic lesson database by grade level or search subjects by grade level.
Biography Writing with the Online BioCube:
Students print a guide sheet, complete research, and then type their findings online. The result is a printable "BioCube" of the person's life.
For great persuasive writing topics, check out the Scholastic News Vote Now pages each week. The topics are always real world and very kid-friendly.
The Writer's Toolkit on Channel 4's BookBox website is an excellent resource for young writers. It has tools to help with getting started, character development, plot development, writing dialogue, and much more. Be sure to visit the "games" section of the site where you can learn how to write limericks, how to turn your favorite book into a film, or even try finishing the missing parts of stories.
Writer's Workshop This is an award winning site created by a teacher to share the strategies of Writer's Workshop. Until this site can be found again, try this Writer's Workshop on the Teachers First website.
Lesley University published a very good article by a teacher who has developed some creative and helpful resources for editing conferences and revising strategies to use with students.
This link has a large number of Shape Books you can print to encourage creative writing.

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PUSD Writing Assessments and Prompts

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Six Traits Writing Resources

Site for Teachers | 6 Traits Official Site
| Student Friendly Rubric | Lessons | Interactive Site

Six traits writing assessment, a site for teachers using 6 traits in the classroom.
Multiple writing resources from Northwest Regional Educational Library, the Official 6 Traits site. This page has excellent definitions of the 6 traits.
6 Traits Student Friendly Rubric (5 point rubrics)
6 Point Student Friendly Rubrics for each of the 6 traits.
Web resources for 6 Traits Writing Instruction
The Billings School District in Billings, Montana created an excellent interactive site with resources for 6 Traits.

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Grammar Resources

Grammar Handbook | Kid-Friendly Grammar
| Grammar PowerPoints |
SchoolHouse Rock Grammar Lyrics

The University of Illinois has published an online grammar handbook to use with writer's workshop.
Stufun.com is a fun site with kid-friendly grammar information
Capital Community College has prepared informational pages as well as PowerPoint presentations to explain grammar and writing concepts.
The lyrics to the Schoolhouse Rock grammar songs can be found at this site. You can also click on the titles at the bottom of the page to hear the songs.
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation is a great online tool for writers. You simply click on grammar or punctuation in the sidebar and choose a topic from the pull-down menu. All the resources appear instantly.

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Spelling

Kid Spell.com has multiple resources and activities to improve student spelling.

Spelling Inventories

Level I
Letter Name Stage, Grades K-2
Assessment
Scoring Guide
Class Composite Form

Level II
Within Word Pattern Stage, Grades 2-3
Assessment
Scoring Guide by Feature
Scoring Guide by Error
Class Composite

Level III
Syllables and Affixes Stage, Grades 3-5
Assessment
Scoring Guide by Feature
Class Composite

Level IV
Derivational Relations Stage, Grades 6-Adult
Assessment
Scoring Guide by Feature
Scoring Guide by Error
Class Composite

Administer these inventories using teacher judgment. If a student misses almost all the words, move down a level. Conversely, if a student gets almost all the words correct, move up a level. The goal is to determine developmental spelling stage. This can only be done when the test is at the right level.

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High Frequency Words

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Writing Contests

For a page filled with outstanding reading and writing contests for your students, visit the Scholastic Contest page. Students can interact with authors, recommend new story ideas, illustrate new books, or write books, stories and letters to win one of the contests on this page.

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Publishing Student Writing Online

Publish Student Writing | Publish Student Book Reviews

The Write Kids encourages students to submit their work to their online magazine.
Write with students around the world and publish your work online: KidPub
High School students can publish their writings and photography online at Susquehanna University
The Writer's Window website from New Zealand publishes student writing for 5-18 year olds. Students can review other's writings or seek writing advice.

Publishing Student Book Reviews Online

Before publishing a book review online, students will want to visit Rodman Philbrick's lessons for Writing High-Quality Book Revie ws.
At the Book Hooks Site students can publish book reviews as well as stories, poems, and drawings.
The Seminole County Public Library is looking for students to write book reviews of their books.
Amazon accepts student reviews of their books. This is a link to the Children’s Books section of their site.

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Reference Tools

Merriam Webster | One Look | Visual Thesaurus

For Merriam Webster's online dictionary and thesaurus.
One Look allows you to look up words in multiple online dictionaries at once
By using the Visual Thesaurus students can finally see the definition and connotation of each synonym generated. Or students can easily click on any of the synonyms on the screen to open a new search for words that have that specific connotation.
For all the poets in your class, be sure to bookmark this rhyming dictionary.
As you teach your students to create bibliographies for their reports and research papers, you may want to visit Easy Bib, a free online advanced bibliography maker. Another site that is especially helpful for younger students is: Noodle Tools Quick Cite . For information on citing online resources, visit the Online Reference Guide to Using Internet Sources site: Citation Styles for Online Resources.

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