The Teachers Language Arts Academy We all know how to read and write, but we also know that practice will improve our skills.  The Language Arts Academy can help you find resources to guide your practice, as well as answers to questions you might have. Find the room you need in the Academy, and take a seat! ACT360 Media has created several DENs (Digital Education Networks) to share ideas on several curricular areas, as well as technology. In the Writing DEN, there is the Tips-O-Matic, which presents short lessons on sentences, paragraphs and essays. This resource is excellent to brush-up on some writing skills for teachers, to find simple explanations for types of paragraphs or paragraph parts, or for students to access on their own. http://www2.actden.com/Writ_Den/Tips/contents.htm DailyGrammar.com will e-mail you a grammar lesson a day. The site also archives all 150 of the lessons, plus short quizzes on each topic, such as adjectives or verbs. The lessons are written for middle and high school students, but would be a great way to brush up on helping verbs, for example. Added 2/7/00 http://www.dailygrammar.com/ William Strunk's classic, Elements of Style, can be found online through the Bartleby.com. If you have any questions about where an apostrophe goes or how to hyphenate words, look at this book. It is indispensable. http://www.bartleby.com/141/ The English-Zone.com has lessons for you to use and interactive quizzes for you to take. The site was created for English language learners, but could be used with a variety of students in different grade levels. There are vocabulary quizzes, grammar lessons, spelling tips and printable worksheets to be used in class. This is a great resource! Added 2/7/00 http://members.home.net/englishzone/index.html Gary B. Larson has posted a list of resources called Garbl's Writing Resources Online. The site is a list of other resources, many of which are very worthwhile. Topics range from punctuation to verb tense to sentence-writing. Take some time to explore the various sites. http://members.home.net/garbl/writing/ The Guide to Grammar and Writing will help you learn about sentence structure, punctuation and paragraph writing. This would be a good resource for teachers or older students, but probably not for younger students. There are interactive quizzes at the ends of the lessons, so you can gauge your progress. Added 2/22/00 http://webster.commnet.edu/HP/pages/darling/original.htm The Handbook for Storytellers will give you a short definition of what storytelling is, as well as reasons to use it and ways to get better at it. This would be useful for teachers of younger children. The Handbook also gives a bibliography of stories. http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/storyhandbook.htm The Stanford-9 Reading test, both the reading comprehension and the reading augmentation, asked students to read and answer questions on folk tales and myths from different cultures. (The augmentation section, called the "Star" test, tests students on items directly related to the state Language Arts standards.) This Myths and Legends site would help you learn more about these genres, expose you to many examples of each, and, perhaps, give you ideas on how to give your students a similar experience. There is a lot of information here. Take some time to look through it. You might want to click on the option, on the initial page, to go to the text-only (no-frames) version of the site. The words will be larger, but the page will appear longer. http://pubpages.unh.edu/~cbsiren/myth.html If you weren't able to find information at previous sites, Anthony Hughes has also published an On Line English Grammar Guide. If you couldn't find an answer to a question in the previous site, you might find it here. The guide can be searched by keyword, by topic in the Table of Contents, or by the first letter of a subject. http://www.edunet.com/english/grammar/index.cfm Purdue University has produced OWL (On-line Writing Lab) to assist students and others in differing aspects of written language. Topics include the writing process, parts of speech and punctuation. Some sections, such as parts of speech, could easily be used with elementary school students (there are worksheets that can be printed out),while the section on the writing process would probably be applicable to middle school or high school students. This is an excellent site. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/writers/by-topic.html Teachers can view test blueprints for standards-based items for the California STAR test. The aumentation problems (called the Star test) are based upon skills highlighted in the state standards. This can give you an idea of what to work on and plan for in the coming year. The document is in PDF format. To learn more about how to access PDF documents, click here. http://www.cde.ca.gov/statetests/star/s2blueprt.html
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