Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Synthesize Ideas in Informational/expository Text
[Accessible by TX Educators. Free Registration/Login Required] Learn how to synthesize and make logical connections between ideas within a text and across two or three texts representing similar or different genres and to support the...
CommonLit
Common Lit: Where Did I Come From
CommonLit.org is a wonderful resource to use in a Language Arts classroom. Each story or article is accompanied by guided reading questions, assessment questions, and discussion questions. In addition, students can click on words to see...
Other
Hong Kong Polytech: Functions in Academic Writing
Provides a wealth of interactive exercises dealing mainly with the structuring of sentences in different kinds of academic writing.
Other
Carson Newman College: Close Reading of a Literary Passage [Pdf]
Provides a number of questions that students can ask themselves about a literary passage when doing a "Close Reading" and following this with an organized piece of writing. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.5
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)
Ascd: Building Literacy in Social Studies: Ch 1: Reading Social Studies Texts
Article provides excellent tips and strategies for building comprehension and critical thinking skills in Social Studies. It describes some of the challenges students have with reading and understanding their textbooks.
Better Lesson
Better Lesson: Analyzing Text Complexity of Non Fiction Sources
This activity will help students read and comprehend nonfiction, specifically biographies, through determining criteria for text complexity. Included is a PDF and Smart Notebook titled Determining Text Complexity, and an example of a...
Capital Community College Foundation
Guide to Grammar and Writing: Definitions of Basic Sentence Parts
This site from Capital Community College Foundation provides all the different parts of speech and their definitions. It also shows word functions and their use.
Capital Community College Foundation
Guide to Grammar and Writing: Exercise in Writing Concise Sentences
Practice rewriting each of these twelve sentences in a more clear and concise manner. Check each sentence against the answer provided to see how well they match up.
Capital Community College Foundation
Guide to Grammar and Writing: Diagramming Sentences Power Point
This handy PowerPoint presentation introduces the concept of sentence diagramming. It includes a number of examples.
Capital Community College Foundation
Guide to Grammar and Writing: Paragraph Development
This site from the Capital Community College helps with paragraph development and topic sentences.
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Classroom Strategies: Frayer Model
The Frayer Model is a strategy that uses a graphic organizer for vocabulary building. This technique requires students to (1) define the target vocabulary words or concepts, and (2) apply this information by generating examples and...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Extended Discussion of Text Meaning and Interpretation
Teachers should provide opportunities for students to engage in high-quality discussions of the meaning and interpretation of texts in various content areas as one important way to improve their reading comprehension.
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Five Areas of Instructional Improvement to Increase Academic Literacy
How can content-area, non-reading-specialist teachers contribute to academic literacy? They can incorporate these five techniques throughout their lessons: (1) provide explicit instruction and supported practice in effective...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Key Literacy Component: Text Comprehension
Text comprehension allows readers to extract or construct meaning from the written word. Students who misread words or misinterpret their meanings are at a disadvantage. Proper instruction can boost students' skills in this key area.
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Analytical Writing in the Content Areas
Because writing is thinking, the organization of students' writing reflects both the structure of their thinking and the depth of their understanding. Students should be writing in all their classes, explaining what they know and how...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Teaching Content Knowledge and Reading Strategies in Tandem
Many areas of instruction can have a rippling effect for the expansion of readers' repertoire of skills, including pre-reading, predicting, testing hypotheses against the text, asking questions, summarizing, etc. Literacy-rich,...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: An Introduction to Analytical Text Structures
Many students are used to writing narratives - stories, description, even poetry, but have little experience with analytical writing. This article is an introduction to six analytical text structures, useful across content areas. See...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: A Summary of "Writing Next"
What does research tell us about effective teaching techniques to help adolescents develop their writing skills? This article summarizes Writing Next, a 2007 study of adolescent writing instruction.
Scholastic
Scholastic: Lesson Plan for Nonfiction Comprehension: Skimming Text
Build comprehension by developing reading strategies for use with nonfiction text. This lesson focuses on teaching students to recognize text elements as clues to help them quickly locate key information in text.
ACT360 Media
Act Den: Writing Den
Need some extra help in spelling, grammar, and writing? Search no further. The writing den gives great tips for sentence structure and even on writing essays. A lot of great information for language arts students and teachers.
Writing Fix
Writing Fix: Show What Your Mind Sees
This writing activity asks writers to make use of both showing and telling as they create a well-organized paragraph of description. After reviewing showing versus telling by building a writer's notebook page, each writer will show what...
Writing Fix
Writing Fix: Serendipitous Character Descriptions
In this lesson plan, students create a unique character and develop a descriptive paragraph utilizing strong word choice.
Writing Fix
Writing Fix: Teaching Students to Compose a Power Paragraph [Pdf]
This PDF lesson, POWER PARAGRAPH, focuses on analysis and will also help students to understand structure in a paragraph. The "power" concept teaches the students to organize their sentences according to different levels of importance....
Writing Fix
Writing Fix: Painting Places With Words
In this instructional activity students learn how to paint a setting with their descriptive choice of words.