Awesome Language Arts Links

If you are like me, I'm always on the hunt for new sources of ideas, engaging texts, and motivating activities. Below are some of my favorite sites that have been amazing resources for me in addition to not requiring me to reinvent the wheel, because, let's face it, who has time for that nowadays??

Odell Educational Research
This site has great informational comparative text sets. The set up is very similar to DBQs and allows kids to pull from multiple sources to answer an overarching question in addition to questions for each specific text.

Newsela
How did I ever get by without this site?? Newsela is awesome for informational texts particularly because you can change the Lexile level to differentiate for your students whether they need to be challenged or remediated. Many of the quizzes also come with quick reading check quizzes which serve as great informal assessments.

Ereading Worksheets
This site has added more and more awesome activities every year as well as aligned most everything to Common Core which makes it even more user friendly. Currently using the character analysis worksheets for my warm-ups, and they are great!

English for Everyone
Another great site for everything Language Arts.

Writing Center
This is a great site for everything writing and editing. From commonly misused words to argument analysis, it provides a plethora of mini lessons to incorporate into the classroom.

Literary Devices
This is where I have my students go for definitions and examples.

Carson-Newman College Poetry Website
Love this site for short poems, particularly if I'm having students compare two poems for a particular literary element.

Bright Hub
I love Bright Hub because it gets my creativity going and gets me looking at lessons and ideas in a new way that I hadn't considered before.

And a Little Bit of Organization to Round Out the Night :)

Best thing I ever stumbled upon was month calendars from the Dollar Tree. They come two to a pack with the month signs sold separately. I bought a pack of each and had my awesome media specialist laminate them. I then took the small circle magnets and put several on the back of both the calendars and the month signs. While I use to take up so much space on my board listing all the upcoming events and assignment due dates, I now am able to give students a two month outlook on what's coming up. This works out especially well for students that struggle and need a more concrete view of how much time they have left to pick up the pace before grades are due. I feel this also gets students into a routine of looking at the board daily for what's going on as well as serving as a reminder to write in their own planner about upcoming projects, tests, quizzes, etc. 

Student Blogs with Pfeffer's "Dead and Gone"

Student Blogs

So during the first 40 minutes of each day, all students in our school attend an academic achievement period for either remediation for acceleration based on their quarter grades and the previous year's standardized test scores. This is the first year I've taught acceleration instead of remediation, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself. I've always stuck to a solid routine of reading comprehension lessons mixed with a couple of work days for students to get help on outside writing and reading assignments (I get students from the entire grade level, not just my team). However, having never planned for an acceleration group, I was a bit stumped. Since we just adopted new textbooks this year, I had the pleasure of ordering new novels and was excited to order the sequel to Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It, Dead and Gone. 

What I really liked about Pfeffer's first two books in this series is that they are both independent but content related. They can be read independently or one right after another. At first I debated about having students split into two groups and half read Life As We Knew It and the other half read Dead and Gone. However, since I didn't have quite as much time as I would have liked, I decided to have everyone read the same novel, and when we rotated in 4 1/2 weeks, I would try out both novels at the same time.

Students were required to complete in class reading and/or check the book out and take it home. Quite a few of my students chose this option once they got about 20 pages into the novel. It's quite a difficult read to put down. When we had discussions in class, students often commented about how they just couldn't imagine what it would be like to have lived through a similar situation. With an emphasis in writing this year, I wanted to come up with something more than just write an essay or a reflection. I wanted something my students could tap into creatively or for those that loved science.

While googling, I came across Dr. Susan Louise Stewart's college syllabus for an Adolescent Literature course at Texas A&M that included a blog activity for this book. Being a typical teacher and habitual idea thief, I immediately jumped on the idea she presented. I gave my students the option of creating a blog in which they wrote as if they were experiencing the similar events as mentioned in the novel, or they could decide to take a research perspective and discuss possibilities of what it might be like should our moon disappear altogether, move further away, or, as in the story, move significantly closer to Earth.

EVEN MY NON-READERS GOT INTO THIS ASSIGNMENT!!!!

My students ended up using SimpleSite.com due to some last minute technical snafus the IT department was working out with the internet filters. My first choices out of shear user friendliness would have been Blogger.com or Weebly.com. However, SimpleSite.com worked just as well, and students were able to navigate it quite easily.

I really gave students free reign to design their websites in whatever way they felt most connected with what they wanted to say in their blogs. I was amazed at the time and attention students paid to the backgrounds of their webpages, the graphics they included, as well as the details of their actual posts. Once we are completely finished on Thursday, I will post links to some of the student blogs to give you an idea of what they were able to accomplish in about 4 class periods of computer time.

All in all, students read for 2 1/2 weeks and spend 4ish class periods blogging. While I would love to have more time, we rotate AAP classes every 4 1/2 weeks, so I'll get my next batch of kiddos in on Friday.

Until then, happy blogging :)

Verb Mood: You mean verbs can be happy and sad??

This is pretty much the reaction my students give me when I introduce verb mood- perplexed looks, some giggles, some eye rolls. You get the picture. Once I get into what verb mood is and subsequent definitions, I finally begin to see the light bulbs come on amongst my kiddos as they realize they've seen these types of sentences somewhere before. Indicative looks quite similar to declarative, and they are already familiar with imperative and interrogative sentences. Conditional and subjunctive verb moods are really the only ones that I have to cover as a result.

In an attempt to have my students understand the changes in wording between the various types of verb mood, I had them create verb mood posters. I gave them each an indicative sentence which they had to manipulate to form each of the other four types of verb mood. They also had to include a picture that represented the change in meaning of each type of sentence. The results were amazing! I gave a test the day after this project was due, and 82 out of 88 students passed! The test also included active and passive voice, but I was still thrilled.

Below is the example I made to demonstrate to my students what I was looking for.

Here are some of the posters my kids created.

HERE are the directions and rubric handout I gave my students. As you can see, I included another example to ensure they understood what I was looking for. My goal is to allow students to fully own the grade they earn.