IXL Learning Language Practice - This site provides TRA students with unlimited opportunities for practice in Mathematics and English Language Arts skills that range from Pre-K to Grade 12. Students can pass the mouse pointer over any skill in the large list of language arts and Math skills and view examples of the type of activity that it presents. TRA offers a paid subscription to IXL Math and ELA to all students. - UPDATED Jan 2021
News ELA - a valuable site for leveled reading material dealing with stories in the current headlines. News ELA provides multiple news articles each day with each article available in 5 distinct Lexile reading ranges, making it appropriately challenging for all levels of students. There is also a large archive of past news articles catalogued by such subtopics as war and peace, science, money, law, health, sports, kids, and arts; All articles found on the news tab are available free, but many articles under the library, text sets, and collections tabs identified by a key symbol, usually require a paid Pro level membership. ORIGINALLY EXTENDED AT THE OUTSET OF COVID 19, NEWELA STILL SEEMS TO BE ALLOWING FREE USE OF ALL FEATURES - UPDATED Jan 2021
ReadWorks - this free site provides teachers with research-based units, lessons, and authentic, leveled non-fiction and literary reading passages online, for free. The ReadWorks curriculum is aligned to the Common Core State Standards and each passage is leveled and assigned a Lexile reading complexity score. This site is free but requires registration. Teachers may set up classes, locate readings by complexity and topic, and assign them to their students. UPDATED Jan 2021
Reading Skills for Today's Adults - this revised site sponsored by Marshall Adult Education, provides a library of graded stories for beginning and intermediate readers in 16 reading sublevels ranging from grades 1- 8 with an optional audio track for reading along. The stories cover topics of interest to adults, including ESOL students, helping them become more informed consumers, parents, employees, citizens and community members. Topics cover areas such as health and wellness, civics, work readiness, community, family, housing, school, shopping, and government. All the stories are adult appropriate and include pre-reading activities (e.g. pictures, questions and terms), comprehension questions, and writing exercises. Select level 1-8 stories for ABE 1, level 9-16 stories for ABE 2, and levels 13-16 for low reading level ABE 3. UPDATED Jan 2021
Reading Skills for Healthcare Workers - the provider of the Reading skills for Today's Adults above is also providing a similar free program for students interested in Healthcare Career Pathways. It provides graded stories on healthcare related topics in nine (9) reading sublevels ranging from level 4.5 to 8.5 and aligned to the CCRS. There are about 25 stories per each sublevel and all include an optional audio track with three (3) read along speeds to help develop fluency. Based on the stated levels, these passages are only appropriate for ABE 2 and ABE 3 classes as well as the higher levels of ESOL. I will further curate this link in a short amount of time. NEW Jan 2021
Odell Education - this site features the Developing Core Proficiencies Curriculum developed by Odell Education for the Regents of NY for their Engage NY curriculum. This free curriculum is comprised of a series of four units at each grade level that provide direct instruction on a set of literacy proficiencies at the heart of the College and Career Readiness Standards. Each unit highlights a specific core literacy proficiency and provides approaches, instructional sequences, handouts, tools and texts for developing independent mastery and creative critical thinking in students. Each site has been provided with a completed set of teacher editions for all levels to enable ease of selection and preparation. UPDATED Jan 2021
Free Readability Formula Calculators -this website may be used to help teachers determine the quantitative complexity of reading passages that are being considered as a resource for an ELA lesson plan. The calculator will compute the Flesh-Kincaid reading grade level as well as other popular readibility formulas. Paste any text you are considering for your students into the site's textbox and it will automatically provide you with a variety of readabillity values. UPDATED Jan 2021
Odell Education-Literacy Toolbox - this page of the Odell Education site provides the Core Proficiencies Toolbox, a collection of adaptable resources for building literacy proficiency. While these handouts, graphic organizers, tools, checklists and rubrics are used throughout the Odell curriculum, they are also designed for teachers and students to use and adapt for their own unique purposes. The toolbox provides scaffolds to develop independent thinking, works with any selected text, guides and structures student reading and thinking at the textual level, and supports the writing process. NEW Dec 2014
Awesome Stories - this is a free website that presents 250 compelling stories composed of 2500 chapters and supported by over 25,000 related primary sources in the form of videos, audio clips, documents and images, so that students can engage, research, think critically, reflect and communicate in order to evaluate the credibility, importance and relevance of the stories. Teachers must register to gain access but there is no charge for the bronze level membership. NEW Nov 2015
Instant Serials - this website presents high interest stories in serial form. It seems that registered users may stream any of the 11 currently available stories for free. There is also a sharing option that allows you to set up a group of readers and schedule when each episode is available to the group (e.g. daily or weekly). Students may read previous episodes of the story to catch up, but must wait for the scheduled release date for new episodes. There is a cost for the sharing option but it is a reasonable $5.95 to share a book with any size group. There are also teacher guides for each of the stories available in PDF form. NEW Jan 2016 - Brockton
America in Class - this site provides a huge collection of primary resources compatible with the CCR Standards including historical documents, literary texts, and works of art. These are all organized by chronological topic with notes and discussion questions included. The site includes major sections on American History for early exploration through the 1920s and other sections focusing on African American history. Teachers should investigate the Professional Development section for huge libraries of lesson plans, webinars,videos, and secondary sources. NEW Nov 2015 - shared by Worcester
ProCon.Org - this ad-free, innovative, digital education website has become a leading source for unbiased information and civic education for students, educators, legislators, journalists and the general public. It provides well-sourced opposing positions on controversial topics. Students must use critical thinking to formulate their own views. No matter whether they are ultimately "pro” or "con” an issue they are empowered with facts, perspectives, and references. Registration is not required. NEW Nov 2015
DOCSTeach - this site sponsored by the National Archives is devoted to using primary documents from U.S. History to generate classroom activities. The home screen provide options to browse ready to use activities, browse thousands of primary documents grouped by topic, or create your own activities by using one of seven available tools, each of which guides you to create an activity with a specific purpose such as finding a sequence, focusing on details, making connections, mapping history, seeing the big picture, weighing the evidence and interpreting data. NEW Oct 2014
SAS Curriculum Pathways - English Language Arts - SAS Curriculum Pathways just announced that it will extend the use of this resource through the 20-21 school year to help with remote learning needs. Curriculum Pathways delivers free online curriculum resources that target higher-order thinking skills with a proven impact on increasing student learning and teacher effectiveness. The English Language Arts resources include more than 300 interactive tools, research inquiries and lessons in Reading Skills (111) Writing Skills (99), Literary Genres (76) American Literature (57), English Literature (53) and Grammar(57). Professional development is also provided to help teachers to integrate the offerings into the classroom. UPDATED Jun 2020
English Tools> - this site provides over 25 tools for learning English. These tools range from simple tools that can alphabetize your sentences or generate word searches to worksheet creators. One of the tools that appear useful will allow users to display and print the complete conjugation of any verb selected with the user selecting the range of persons and tenses. Try them out! NEW Jul 2021
Achieve the Core - ELA Lessons - this site includes hundreds of annotated ELA lessons aligned with the CCR standards that are intended to highlight one or more of the ELA shifts. Featured at the 2016 Annual CCR Conference are the Text Set Project "Expert Packs". The are fully developed lessons that feature text sets including several related readings to build student background knowledge and vocabulary. UPDATED Oct 2016
Saylor Academy Open Textbooks - Saylor Academy, one of the providers of free MOOC courses that are listed below, also provide 100+ free textbooks for students and educators. Teachers looking for high complexity reading materials to prepare their students for success in college, should consider using sections from these books Some examples include many introductory College subjects as well as courses on College Success,Steps to Job Success, Business Writing, and Introduction to Algebra. NEW Feb 2016
OpenStax College - OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving access to free quality learning materials. All textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of most courses. Teachers looking for high complexity reading materials to prepare their students for success in college, should consider using single chapters from these book in subjects of interest to students. Some examples of appropriate subject areas are U.S. History, Biology, Psychology, Economics and Algebra. OpenStax College is an initiative of Rice University and is made possible through the generous support of several philanthropic foundations. NEW Feb 2016
Lexile Framework for Reading Complexity - the College Career Readiness (CCR)standards use lexile scores to evaluate the complexity of reading material. This site provides several features that will assist you in selection of reading materials for your students. The Quick Book Search textbox allows you to enter a title or author name to locate the Lexile score of the book. The Find a Book option allows you to view a large list of books between a selected Lexile range. The Lexile Analyzer provides a tool which allows you to paste text to have it evaluated for Lexile level. NEW Oct 2014
Lexile by Chapter Guides - this subsection of the above site explores the text complexity within a large number of texts by providing Lexile measures for every chapter in the text. Each guide includes a graph and table displaying the Lexile information to help educators, parents, and students better understand where the peaks and valleys of complexity reside within a text. NEW Aug 2016
MCAS 2019 Test Items - MCAS released test items for all grades and subjects provide teachers and students with a wealth of practice exercises of sufficient difficulty and problem solving intensity for use in class and homework. The previous five years of released MCAS test items are also available below by year. UPDATED MAY 2021
___MCAS 2018 Test items
___MCAS 2017 Test items
___MCAS 2016Test items
___MCAS 2015 Test items
English Worksheets Land - this site provides 1000s of free K-5 level printable worksheets directly aligned to the ELA Common Core Standards. Although these worksheets currently are limited to level 5 and lower, they provide complete coverage all of the CCR Reading Literature (RL) and Language (L) standards with a large number of worksheets available for each standard. This allows TRA teachers to select those topics that are appropriate for adult students. NEW Nov 2014
English for Everyone - this website provides teachers with a great free resource of printable English worksheets. All Literacy, Pre-GED, GED and English as a Second Language (ESOL) teachers and students should be able to benefit from this website. In the left margin you will find an index containing hundreds of topics that lead to quality teaching materials. If you use any of the materials on this website make sure to retain their logo in the top left corner of the worsheet. NEW Mar 2016 - shared by Worcester
Reading Horizons Instructor Workshop -this link is for TRA teachers who are using the Reading Horizons program and have been given a login and password. This will allow you to access an online workshop provided by Reading Horizons which will enhance your knowledge of the features of the program. NEW Jan 2014
Townsend Press Learning Center -this site has supplementary exercises to accompany Townsend Press vocabulary and grammar books. Although you need to create an account to get full access, guest exercises are also available. NEW Jan 2013
Free Language Stuff - at this site you can find hundreds of free language worksheets and activities in more than 20 areas including parts of speech, idioms,sentence structure, verb tense,irregular past tense,antonyms and synonyms,following directions,comparatives and superlative, auxillary verbs and many others. NEW Feb 2015 - Worcester
Top 100 Non-Fiction Books -this site provides a list of the 100 most frequently read non-fiction books for each College and Career Readiness grade band (A-E)classified by both the ATOS Readability level and student interest level. UPDATED Dec 2014
Top 100 Fiction Books -this site provides a list of the 100 most frequently read fiction books for each College and Career Readiness grade band (A-E)classified by both the ATOS Readability level and student interest level. NEW Dec 2014
CC Better Lesson - This site claims to provide over 3000 free fully developed Common Core aligned lessons in both Math and ELA developed by Master teachers. ELA lessons are developed for each grade level divided into the CC categories Reading Informational Text, Reading Literature, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language. Levels K-5 also include the category Foundational Reading. NEW May 2014
English for Everyone - this website provides teachers with a great free resource of printable English worksheets. All Literacy, Pre-GED, GED and English as a Second Language (ESOL) teachers and students should be able to benefit from this website. In the left margin you will find an index containing hundreds of topics that lead to quality teaching materials. If you use any of the materials on this website make sure to retain their logo in the top left corner of the worksheet. NEW Feb 2013 - shared by Worcester
Fast Forward Massachusetts - allows you to access streaming video lessons from PBS Literacy Links through a special arrangement with the State of Masschusetts. The former GED Connection series is no longer available on the site because it is being redone to reflect changes in pedagogy and approved testing instruments. However Pre-GED Connections and Workplace Essential Skills are still available. All video series include Mathematics videos. Learners can easily access videos at home on a computer, tablet or smart phone or anywhere there is a connection. These videos are free to all MA residents. Updated MAY 2014
Ideas for Teaching Writing
Strategies for Teaching Writing - a helpful listing of many strategies for teaching writing skills. Strategies are listed by each phase of the writing process and from the perspective of both student and teacher strategies.
Teacher's Desk Lesson Plans - A collection of over 250 lesson ideas for Spelling, Writing, English, Reading, and Vocabulary activities, with a few extras thrown-in all grade levels. This site also contains many of its lessons in fun game formats.
Puzzlemaker - The Puzzlemaker is a cool tool to create math blocks, word searches or crosswords (you just submit the words), letter tiles, cryptograms and more. These types of puzzles could be very useful in math, spelling and vocabulary instruction. . . and can make learning sometimes difficult spelling words a fun activity!latest Running | Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG "UNC Patent" Obsidian/Blue Chill-White For Sale – Fitforhealth
