Literary and historical topics. "Shmoop will make a handy starting point for developing background knowledge, for topic, question, and thesis development, and for test prep. Some teachers will appreciate its value for preparing lessons."
This site provides resources for authors including videos, study guides, lesson plans, and links. Search easily by title, author name, grade level, or subject area.
Provides character analysis, historical background, themes, famous quotes, pictures, FAQs, modern connections, essays, bibliography, and further readings on hundreds of books. Although you must pay to have access to all the support materials, you can see useful excerpts. You can choose to buy the support materials for a single book, or have a site-wide subscription.
A vocabulary quiz with a global conscience. Words get harder or easier depending on whether you get the answer right or wrong. For each correct answer, freerice.com donates 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. Kids can have words read to them. Teachers should definitely check out the options page to make the best use of this site with kids.
This is a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics.
Free Online Literature with more than 2000 Classic Texts - Literature Book Notes, Author Biographies, Book Summaries and Reference Books - Study Guides to the most read books and Help for Teachers.
A collection of pre-formatted graphic organizers that can be integrated into activities and lesson plans or use by themselves. Three different formats for your convenience: HTML, Word, and PDF
This website has lots of online mysteries to read and solve. They provide many examples of short mysteries written by students. If you read more about the mysterynet website, you can find links to classic mystery authors and even purchase digital copies of their books. This website supports the MCPS grade 4, quarter 4 writing mysteries lesson 1.
These are more than spiffy-looking printable webs. Take some time to read about the teaching philosophy that led to the downloadable resources here. Some of the resources are in .DOC format and can be used by students who keyboard instead of write.
Intelligent, context spell checker developed by dyslexics for dyslexics. This online spell checker goes beyond others by looking at context and flexible spelling. Just copy or type your text into the box, let Ghotit help you fix it, and then copy and paste it back into your document.