Curated OER
Persuasion as Text: Organizational, Grammatical, and Lexical Moves in Barbara Jordan’s "All Together Now"
A thorough instructional activity on persuasive writing takes middle schoolers through several activities, including group discussion, collaborative posters, and independent writing. They compare historical speeches and analyze the...
Moore Public Schools
Lyric Poetry
Discover lyric poetry through a reading of Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar and analyze its meaning with three short-answer questions covering symbolism, personification, alliteration, metaphors, and similes.
Curriculum Corner
8th Grade ELA "I Can" Statement Posters
Eighth grades can master the ELA Common Core standards! Show your learners the connection between classroom activities and assignments and the standards with this set of "I Can" statement posters. Each standard has been rewritten as an...
Curriculum Corner
8th Grade ELA Common Core Checklists
How close are your eighth graders to mastering the ELA Common Core standards? Keep an eye on progress with these charts, which include every eighth grade identifier and full standard text. As you move through the year and teach, reteach,...
K12 Reader
Jabberwocky
Readers demonstrate their ability to use word endings and word relationships to identify the parts of speech of the nonsense words in Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky."
Curated OER
Leveled Vocabulary for And Then There Were None
Chaotic, perjury, tenacious, vague, predatory, idiosyncrasy. Using Marzano and Brown’s six steps of direct instruction for vocabulary (choose, restate, illustrate, use, discuss, play) readers of And Then There Were None engage in a...
Curated OER
Persuasion in Historical Context: The Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address is a powerful text. Use it to teach persuasion and the importance of word choice. The activity detailed here includes a scaffolded background knowledge activity that includes image analysis of photos from the Civil...
Curated OER
Ethos, Logos, and Pathos in Civil Rights Movement Speeches
Examine three speeches while teaching Aristotle's appeals. Over the course of three days, class members fill out a graphic organizer about ethos, pathos, and logos, complete an anticipatory guide, read speeches by Martin Luther King Jr.,...
Capital Community College Foundation
Guide to Grammar and Writing: Notorious Confusables
This quiz asks students to read a sentence and type the correct word, from the pair given, into the box and click "answer' to see if they are correct. Links are provided to a tutorial, a list of quizzes, and "Guide to Grammar and Writing."
Other
Alpha Dictionary: Most Often Misspelled Words in English
Listed alphabetically, these commonly misspelled words often find their way into our writing! Here are the correct spellings, with brief tips for remembering how to write these words correctly. In addition, use the links of the left to...
Capital Community College Foundation
Guide to Grammar and Writing: Building a Better Vocabulary
A wonderful site for the vocabulary enthusiast. Includes ways to build your vocabulary, resource suggestions, information about word roots, a section on suffixes and prefixes, as well as some higher-level word quizzes.
Grammar Check
Grammar Check: 33 Commonly Misunderstood Words & Phrases (Infographic)
This infographic provides a list of words and phrases that are commonly misused in formal writing. Students will see different homonyms that are misused and find ways to discover them.
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Commonly Misused Words: How Their Effects Affect You
This tutorial focuses on commonly misused words with a variety of media. It offers a YouTube video, "Using the Correct Words;" an infographic which lists 8 commonly misused word sets in comic format; a slide show with tips for the...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Commonly Misused Words
This tutorial focuses on commonly misused words such as homophones and homonyms; it provides a video and two slideshows. The YouTube video shows humorous misrepresentatations of words. The first of the two slideshows defines terms and...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Homonyms
This homonym tutorial begins with the poem "My Spell Checker" to show the importance of learning the difference between words. This is followed by a slide show of commonly misused homonyms, including definitions and examples. It offers...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Understanding the Question
This lesson focuses on how to understand a reading question; it details three main parts: look for content and process words, state the question in your own words, and restate the question as a statement. It explains each and provides...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Vocabulary Words
This lesson focuses on the need to look up vocabulary words when given a list from an assigned reading to help better understand the text. It offers a literary example of such a list. This information is provided in text and in audio...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Analogy
This slideshow focuses on analogy including defining it, discussing its purpose, and providing two literary examples. W.11-12.2d Lang/Fig/Voc
Annenberg Foundation
Annenberg Learner: Grades 6 8 Spelling Bee
Read and listen to stories with some words missing. Fill in the missing words, see how many words you spelled correctly, and get corrections for the ones you missed.
Annenberg Foundation
Annenberg Learner: Interactives: Spelling Bee: Introduction
This is an introduction Interactive Spelling Bee; it explains how the game works by grade level: Grades 1-8 listen to three stories separately and spell words from each story; high school students will listen to sentences and spell words...
Annenberg Foundation
Annenberg Learner: Grades 9 10 Spelling Bee
Read and listen to stories with some words missing. Fill in the missing words, see how many words you spelled correctly, and get corrections for the ones you missed.
Other
A Word a Day: Theme List
If you need to develop your own practice spelling list, visit the "Word--a--Day" archives (back to 1996) to find interesting vocabulary/spelling words based on weekly themes such as "Words about Marriage," "Words about Laughing," and...
International Reading Association
Reading Online: Teaching Vocabulary to Adolescents to Improve Comprehension
An article highlighting the improvements of middle and high school students' reading comprehension through a sixteen-week program. Includes introduction, overview of the intervention, course structure, sample activities, assessments, and...
PBS
Pbs: Academic Vocabulary in the Common Core: Middle School English Language Arts
This video [14:33] shows a demonstration of academic vocabulary instruction through the context of a complex work, a poem. The teacher demonstrates how to access the literal meaning of new vocabulary and then infer the deeper meaning....