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"This I Believe is an international organization engaging people in writing and sharing essays describing the core values that guide their daily lives. Some 100,000 of these essays, written by people from all walks of life, are archived here on our website, heard on public radio, chronicled through our books, and featured in weekly podcasts." I use this site for writing exercises in my reading class, and they are great to spark discussion and open my kids' eyes to events around the world. If you're having trouble getting your kids to write, try this!

This is a great resource for free writing activities. The site helps engage the entire brain in the writing process and the students really seem to like the creative limitations put on their writing.

I love love love both the NYTimes educational supplementary materials and the fact that they exist. Recently I tweaked a Times lesson plan on writing your own obituary to help the students set goals. As we move toward the Core Standards, it's more important than ever for kids to read non-fiction and journalism.

Several types of concept maps (in INTERACTIVE pdf format) This means you can link to them, students can access them, complete them, save and turn in electronically. They can also be downloaded and printed if there's little to no access to classroom computers. Or do some collaborative/small group work. Have small groups of students complete a task, work together on completing and explain/defend their concept map to whole group. Non-linguistic representations are a high impact teaching strategy that work especially well with visual learners. Consider using these for organization, pre-writing, summaries, etc.

El Pais is a Spanish newspaper, which writes articles on everything from politics and world news to sports. It's great for pictures, too. It's great for reading, building vocab, and introducing more in depth cultural topics. I use it for my Spanish 3 class.