Interactive Learning Websites

The Language Arts section of LearningReviews.com has categories on reading, writing, journalism, English language learners (also called ELL, ESL or EFL), and foreign languages. There are some fantastic websites out there to help students develop their reading, writing and speaking skills...

Here's one I love that's great for any grade level (K-12).  Adults can give and get a lot from it too.  It's called FreeRice.com.  FreeRice.com wants to accomplish two things:  Improve your English vocabulary and end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people.  For every vocabulary word you answer correctly, Free Rice will donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. 

You have the option to keep track of your vocabulary level and how much rice you've donated.  The difficulty of the vocabulary words is based on how many mistakes you make. Rice is NOT taken away if you make a mistake.  The vocabulary simply adjusts to the learner's appropriate level, based on previous correct and incorrect answers. 

For kids in elementary school (K-5), express your creativity by writing, illustrating and publishing your own storybook online.  The Big Universe is a free website where you can create your book cover, write your story, and illustrate it using their large library of artwork.  You can even upload your own pictures to illustrate your book.  The Big Universe has a helpful demo and several short videos containing tips on how to create your book.  Once completed, you publish it online and can share it with others on the website.  Read books other kids have written as well.

I've used this with several first grade students. They just loved creating and illustrating their own stories, and seeing them online. Free registration is required, and kids 13 years old and younger must use the website with a parent or guardian. 

 

Writing poetry is a favorite activity of middle school students (6-8).  And riddle poems are a fun way for students to express their creativity and try to stump their friends and classmates.  Read-Write-Think has an excellent free website for this type of poetry, Riddle Interactive.  Riddle Interactive describes, step by step, how to think about and construct a riddle poem.  It provides an example, and guides you through creating your poem.  When you're ready to write your poem, the website provides a riddle poem organizer in Adobe Reader, that can be printed after you fill it in (or before, if you want to make copies of the form for a class).

Read-Write-Think has several engaging language arts activities for students of all ages.  These activities are a result of a partnership between the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English.

 

 

There's a cool website for high school students (9-12) to write creatively.  Check out Make Beliefs Comix.  Bill Zimmerman designed this site as a place where writers could create their own world and free themselves from their immediate problems.  You pick the characters and their emotions, write their thoughts and dialogue, edit the strip, then print it or email it to yourself and your friends. 

Panel prompts help define when the dialogue in each panel occurs.  You can write your own, or use one such as "To be continued ..." to turn your comix into a series. Dialogue prompts at the bottom of each screen provide helpful hints about using the characters as well as guidance on tapping into your creativity for writing dialogue.

The web provides your a huge library of free lesson plans and teaching resources.  So take a peek at a few of my favorite sites for finding ways to jazz up what you're doing.  Newbies, you'll find lots of help in these sites.

One of my all-time faves is Teachnology.com.  They offer fee-based resources, but there's plenty of free stuff available, including:

• A lesson plan database searchable by subject and grade level
• Rubrics for all subjects
• Unit planning based on themes
• Webquests
• Printables, such as calendars and worksheets
• Links to professional development resources

Simply great for a broad range of teacher needs!

Another fantastic resource is TeachersFirst.com.  Written by teachers for teachers, it has user-friendly searchable database of lessons, units and web resources.  What is particularly helpful to me are the In the Classroom notes that provide lots of helpful hints on how to use the material in your classes.

There are dozens of other sites with lesson plan and unit ideas.  Many of them specialize in one or two subject areas, such as the arts, science, math or history.  I've listed those I've checked out and found useful under Teacher Tools>Lesson Planning.

In addition to lesson planning, communicating with parents is essential but not always easy to do.  I've used newsletters aplenty, but they don't always make it out of the backpacks and into the parents hands... if they make it INTO the backpacks to begin with.  Some schools I've worked in have well-maintained websites with good tech support.  Others -- let's just say they're works in progress.  So  I've found blogs to be helpful for getting the word to parents.  A super simple one is Blogger, now owned by Google.  It's easy to set up and maintain.  'Nuf said.

In the Lesson Planning section, I've listed nearly 50 sites with free lesson plans teachers and homeschooling parents can use with their students.