PUBLIC MARKS with tags msvt & "ms:language arts"

Great site to enabling students to write a great biography using the following steps:To create an exciting biography, you will now follow these steps: 1. Questioning | 2. Learning | 3. Synthesis | 4. Story-Telling Six Traits of Effective Writing

Problem-solving/decision-making tool for students/teachers. Free until June 2009, but only $299 for site license. This is a great web-based tool for helping students analyze complex issues. Most appropriate for middle and high school

Easy to use Comic Creator to inspire story-telling. Choose the background for your Action hero. Use the slider to choose the pose. Add speech bubbles and text. Click next top add up to six frames.

Read & Create Children's Picture Books Online - Great authoring tool for creating your own books. Use the library of pictures or upload your own.

Excellent site for different genre examples and organizers. Takes time to get familar with site but worth it. Nice for smartboard as there is a write online feature.

Index of Idiomatic expressions, spanish and french equivalents, some cartoon examples, audiory samples, contextual examples

Welcome to the Virtual Library of Conceptual Units. The Virtual Libray includes conceptual teaching units for middle and high school English/Language Arts classes. These units have been designed by preservice and practicing teachers at The University of Georgia. The units follow principles of curriculum and instruction developed by George Hillocks, Jr., (see, e.g., Dynamics of English Instruction, Grades 7-12, by Hillocks, McCabe, and McCampbell; Random House, 1971). The process for designing these units is described in Peter Smagorinsky's Teaching English through Principled Practice (Merrill/Prentice-Hall, 2002) and Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units (Heinemann, 2008; an online Instructor's Guide is available for this book as well).The units are designed to cover 4-6 weeks (assuming daily class periods of 45-55 minutes). Each is organized around a concept such as a theme (e.g., Coming of Age), genre (e.g., satire), strategy (e.g., understanding irony), literary period (e.g., Victorian Age), movement (e.g., Transcendantalism), region (e.g., Authors of Georgia), or author (e.g., the works of Emily Dickinson).

Hypertextopia is a space where you can read and write stories for the internet. On the surface, it looks like a mind-map, but it embeds a word-processor, and allows you to publish your stories like a blog. It's designed to facilitate the writing of axial hypertexts by making a distinction between the fragments (essential elements) and the shards (minor, but enriching elements) of a story. You write in Hypertextopia by dragging the fragment arrow (the large one) or the shard arrow (the small one) and dropping them onto other fragments and shards, or onto empty space.

Nice example of how to use wordle in the classroom as a pre-reading strategy.

Online writing tool with picture and text tools to complement the study of medieval themes

Welcome to Myths and Legends. This site is for pupils, teachers and all those who enjoy stories and storytelling. The British Isles is rich in myths, folktales and legends. Almost every town, city and village in Britain has its own special story, be it a Celtic legend, Dark Age mystery, strange happening or fable.

Our Jury System at Play The jury has reached a verdict! Justice by the People is a powerful new way to build your students’ language arts skills and understanding of civics. This national standards–based program, created by the Foundation of the American Board of Trial Advocates and Scholastic Inc., underscores the importance of the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to students in grades 5–8. This is an oustanding resource with all resources, including the interactive simulation, can be used online or downloaded.

Companion to textbook Houghton Mifflin Spelling and Vocabulary but still useful for grades 1-6. Hover over the word or definition to hear it read aloud.

Interactive tutorial for use of possessive and contracted apostrophes

vocabulary mapping

The Model Bank is a collection of over fifty model papers that illustrate each type of writing in the Elements of Languageprogram. Each Writer's Model is a fully interactive model paper, complete with hyperlinked annotations and writing tips. Each model is also accompanied by a step-by-step Writer's Guide that students can print out and use as a reference when writing their own papers. Word Watch and Fab Vocab or interactive vocabulary tools.

Student blogs for independent writing grades 6-8

This Web site is dedicated to the short story and to those interested in reading light prose. (In web page format, so it is easy to use with a text reader.) Fewer and fewer people these days read short stories. This is unfortunate--so few will ever experience the joy that reading such fine work can give. The goal of this site is to give a nice cross section of short stories in the hope that these short stories will excite these people into rediscovering this excellent source of entertainment.

MapMyWord is an interactive graphic dictionary and thesaurus, which dynamically draws color-coded representation of words, relationships (16 types), and meanings in radial clickable graphs. The g, s, t superscripts denote words suitable for GRE, SAT, and TOEFL levels, respectively. Special editable features include Pronunciation, Wordlist Difficulty Setting, Next Word Randomization, Spelling Suggestions, Sample Usage mini-Messages, and Clickable Nodes and Words. Where can I use MapMyWord?

Excellent site for older students to manage English/Language arts skills.

A grade 7 classroom blog with a variety of posts to stimulate reading, writing, and learning. The teacher and each student has their own blog. This front page must be a feed of all the most recent posts from the blogroll. This is an easy way for keeping track of who is doing what.

Transitional devices are like bridges between parts of your paper. They are cues that help the reader to interpret ideas in the way that you, as a writer, want them to understand. Transitional devices help you carry over a thought from one sentence to another, from one idea to another, or from one paragraph to another with words or phrases. And finally, transitional devices link your sentences and paragraphs together smoothly so that there are no abrupt jumps or breaks between ideas.

An online tool for mapping out an argument for a persuasive essay or debate. Simple and easy to use from anywhere. Print your final version to a PDF to save on your computer or send to the laser printer to hand in to your teacher.