With the increasingly easy access to video games, television, and computers, it is more difficult than ever to keep the attention of children in the classroom. Reading, writing, listening, and speaking, just a few of the components of Language Arts, are essential areas to master in order for students to continue to grow and succeed both inside and outside of the classroom.

 

This resource will aid teachers in locating exciting, substantive, and memorable exercises for students from Kindergarten to Middle School. You will also find additional resources that explain the theory and principles of Language Arts, as well as extensive resources that will link you to other teachers, lesson plans, and innovative ideas to make language arts come alive in the classroom.

 

Reading and Writing Resources for Young Children (K-3)

 

• Academy Curricular Exchange : provides over 30 links to lessons plans and activities for a variety of language arts areas for kids K-5th grade. Here you will find projects such as how to write creatively, how to write a good paragraph, how to reinforce alphabet sounds and letters, and how to organize the events of a story.

 

• By Gosh : provides links to several illustrated full text classic children stories. Young children will benefit from the easy to navigate pages, accompanying drawings, and easy to understand language and content of familiar stories such as “Three Little Pigs,” and “Peter Rabbit.”

 

• Education Place’s Wacky Web Tales is based off of the fun and educational “mad libs” exercise. Here children can hone their typing skills, spelling, imagination, and grammatical knowledge by filling in the prompts and watching their story unfold . Also suitable for older children.

 

• PBS provides an interactive series of exercises to improve young children’s reading comprehension. These activities incorporate familiar PBS characters and shows such as “Arthur” while helping improve reading skills.

 

• ReadWriteThink provides an excellent lesson plan to introduce your young classroom to the sounds and structure of poetry. By participating in this “found poetry” activity, your students will learn the basic structure of poetry while sharpening their reading and comprehension skills.

 

• Scholastic features several activities for younger children to help build literacy. This site also provides a helpful teacher ‘ s guide, explaining the aims of each exercise. “Naming with Nina” build s object-word association skills, “Rhyming with Reggie” build s sound and word pattern skills, and “Letter Recognition with Leo” allows kids to enhance their alphabet competency.

 

• Search Lit offers several e- texts suited for children in kindergarten to first grade. They offer links to short stories, poems and fiction. Each story also comes equipped with a lesson plan for teachers.

 

• Writing Den includes several helpful audio and visual activities to enhance reading comprehension through listening and pictures. Here you can browse a number of topics, which can each be broken down into words, sentences, or paragraphs with accompanying audio clips. This resource is also suited to older children depending on the level of desired difficulty.

Reading and Writing Exercises for Grades 4-6

 

• Aesop’s Fables : provides total access to the full text of all Aesop’s Fables online. These entertaining, substantive tales are the perfect blend of fun and philosophy to engage your students while helping them with their analytical and comprehension skills. Can also be used on different levels for younger and older students.

 

• Columbia Education Center provides a lesson plan to enhance your students’ creative writing skills. Here you will find a lesson plan entitled “Potato Possibilities,” which guides kids in visualizing then recording sensory characteristics such as taste and smell, which are instrumental for descriptive and creative writing.

 

• Creative Drama and Theater Education Resource Site provides several activities that will enhance students’ listening and speaking comprehension. Students will be encouraged to follow directions, act in pairs, alone, or with the class, and present and act in a variety of fun and engaging situations.

 

• Kidzone offers a variety of language arts games suited specifically for young children Kindergarten through 3rd grade. This site features alphabet recognition, word lists, creative writing exercises, as well as printable tracing and handwriting resources.

 

• LD Online gives you an extensive look at several approaches and methods to teaching students vocabulary. While this site is specifically tailored to kids with ADHD and other learning disabilities, its recommendations will apply to any student who is having trouble retaining new words and expanding his or her vocabulary in writing or speaking.

 

• PBS offers an interactive array of activities to help boost reading comprehension skills. Here you will find exercises involving different subjects such as life science, grammar, and vocabulary, complimented by clips and multimedia presentations that will help keep your class focused and engaged on the material.

 

• ReadWriteThink provides a fun and challenging activity for your upper grade classroom. This lesson plan details how to start a classroom newspaper, and how your kids will benefit from the research, writing, and editing processes that go along with this extended activity.

 

• Search Lit: offers several e-texts suited for 5-6th graders. They offer links to over 1,000 short stories, bibliographies, speeches, popular novels, hundreds of poems and works of fiction. Each story also comes equipped with a lesson plan for teachers.

 

• The Resource Room improves upon your students ‘ basic vocabulary by encouraging a multi-sensory approach to learning. Their ” Reading and Comprehension ” section offers an array of exercises covering topics such as phrase comprehension, categorizing concepts, listening and vocabulary comprehension.

Activities for Middle School Students

 

• Biblomania provides access to over 2,000 classic texts. Students can use this site to explore literature, research a variety of subjects, and study literary texts.

 

• Daily Grammar provides a variety of exercises and resources for older students to understand and utilize proper grammar. This site simplifies and explains complex grammar rules through fun games and interactive exercises, and is suitable for a range of grades and learning levels.

 

• Discovery Channel provides several lesson plans to classic texts and themes used in Middle School. This site has links to the Revolutionary War, where students will enhance reading comprehension and analysis through reading Thomas Paine, and hosts resources on Lord of the Flies  in addition to other popular texts and themes.

 

• Marin Community College offers 7 tips to improve reading comprehension that can be used as a reference sheet for students throughout their academic career. Their approach outlines paragraph structure, reasoning, predicting what will happen next, and summarizing and reviewing concepts.

 

• Quia provides an excellent study tool for older students to cement their understanding of grammar and parts of speech. This interactive flash card exercise quizzes students on the meaning of adverbs, nouns, adjectives and other grammar concepts .

 

• PBS offers interactive activities that will engage older kids while helping them understand more advanced forms of literature and poetry. PBS offers exercises involving works such as “Anne Frank’s Diary,” Seamus Heaney’s poem “Blackberry Picking,” and poems by W.S. Merwin.

 

• ReadWriteThink offers an interactive activity to enhance your middle schoolers’ grammatical comprehension. This exercise incorporates friendly competition to motivate students to learn the basic structure of words and sentences.