Language Arts Sites and Resources

Writing Resources

The Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) this site has excellent resources for teaching writing across the curriculum.

Poetry

Audio recordings of the poetry of Robert Frost. This site includes many recordings of Frost reading his own works.

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Literacy Strategies

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.
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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Vocabulary Studies

Match vocabulary words with their meanings and donate rice to help end world hunger.

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:
How To Improve Your Questioning Techniques

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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:
Writer's Workshop (Intermediate Grades)

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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.
For great persuasive writing topics, check out the Scholastic News Vote Now pages each week. The topics are always real world and very student-friendly.
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.

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. This is a link to their exhaustive index. Just look at the bold words to make it more manageable. This page even includes a link for students (or you!) to Ask Grammar their grammar questions.
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 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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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 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

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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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