English Language Arts

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Develop writing with story starters Learn to ask questions. Learn to answer questions. Put thoughts in writing. Write about themes. 50 story starters on Pinterest with both photo and written story starter. Teach with movies. Elementary writing prompts and story starters for kids. Scholastic magazines and learning resources Using sentence stems for reading and writing. Helps build a scaffold for student thinking. National Writing Project resources for teaching writing Free eBooks - Project Gutenberg. Over 61,000 books available as HTML, ePub or Kindle. Read online or send to Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive. Recommended: Read History of the Plague in London by Daniel Defoe. First hand account of life in 1664. Need something lighter? Check out Children's Bookshelf. Argument Writing for Literature Learn how to write compelling argumentative essays. Complete playlist with superb set of resources designed by Catlin Tucker. Perfect for either teacher or student. Celebrate poet Ina Coolbrith's centenial! Find out more about author Aleta George and her writings about California culture including Ina.   The Art of the Metaphor TED-Ed provides lessons worth sharing. The video above is The Art of the Metaphor. It is narrated by poet Jane Hirshfield and animated by Ben Pearce. Lessons are organized into three steps: Watch Think Dig deeper

• In these short videos, various children's books authors share insights, tips and experience. This video is from Nik Bruel, the author of the Bad Kitty series. From NBC Learn
• Read Write Think
  This is the essential one-stop shop for reading, writing and literacy. It contains complete lesson plans for creating a reading and writing classroom. Developed by the International Reading Association (IRA) and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
• Starfall
  Excellent online lessons for "emergent readers." The lessons and short animations are highly engaging. This is an excellent site to recommend to parents for use at home.
• Grappling with Text Complexity:
  For teachers, learning how to help students do close reading is one of the harder challenges in implementing Common Core. Watch this great video on how to help students get the GIST of a passage.
  • Getting the GIST is also illustrated in this different lesson video called Collaborative Summarizing in 7th Grade History
• Library of Congress
  Here is a world of primary resources - whether you need something from American Memory, Photographs, Film or Manuscripts. Click here for Teachers.
• Citation Machine.
  This site helps both students and teachers learn how to cite research.
• American Association of School Librarians
  AASL provides a world of information. Check out their Toolkits.
• Skillswise:
  The BBC hosts this site for English and Maths (yes, that is how the Brits say it) for Adults.
• Great iPad Apps to Generate Writing Prompts: Teachers need story starters. Here are apps to make it easy. You may also want to check out her previous blog Web Tools to Teach Writing Through Comics.