Hi Friends!
I hope you are having a wonderful January! I know the weather has been tricky and a quite a trial for some areas the last few weeks. I wish nothing more that this blog post finds you safe and comfortable in your home.
I was sitting in my classroom browsing my usual websites, and I said to myself, "What a great blog post this would be for my fellow English teachers!". I constantly use a group of websites for a variety of reasons that are worthy of sharing. Any English teacher knows, in the Language Arts world, we are dealing with many subcategories of "English". There is grammar, mechanics, writing, reading, and all the rest. The websites I am going to share are extremely helpful in my classroom on a daily and weekly basis. They spark ideas, lessons, activities, and sometime I just use the resources for ancillary material. I hope these are helpful to you too!
1. UEN-Utah Education Network-This website has a variety of interactive English Language Arts activities that are interactive. It has word games, vocabulary practice, grammar practice and writing and spelling. If you are lucky enough to have 1:1 devices in your classroom, this is an educational, engaging site to send your students if you have early finishers!
2. John Greene's Crash Course YouTube Channel: Have you ever watched any of the famous author, John Greene's, Crash Courses? They are FANTASTIC! He has so many of them, and there are great videos for novels, skills and other English-related topics.
3. The Literacy Shed: The website has incredible short films that are categorized by themes. These short films are great for teaching concepts like inference, drawing conclusions, main idea, summary and other important reading skills.
4. English Grammar 101-Working on grammar with your students? Need bell ringer ideas? This website brings students through the steps of grammar. I use this website ALL the time.
5. Teachers Give Teachers-Do you use HyperDocs in your classroom with your students? Here is a website where you can search FREE HyperDocs by subject, key word and category.
6. Writers Digest Writing Prompts-I am always looking for fun, creative writing prompts for my students, and Writers Digest has just that! Read through the scores of prompts that you find appropriate for your classroom. Many of them are soooo creative!
7. DOGONews: Looking for quick, interesting, informative reading passages for your students? This site is great for non-fiction, engaging articles.
8. Teaching Tolerance-This website has such great teaching resources to teach the theme of "tolerance" in many different facets-religion, heritage, disabilities, color of skin, nationality and so forth. This website has perspective texts and lesson plans to use in the classroom. This is great for texts like The Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, and other texts with the man vs. society conflict.
These are just some of the websites that I use. In the future, I will share some more, along with Google Apps I use. Keep your students reading, writing, engaged and excited!
