6-8 Interactive Language Arts Games

-Join classrooms in almost a dozen countries as they share information on their communities and themselves. Knowing you, Knowing Me offers seven collaborative projects for middle school students. Through these projects, students have an opportunity to learn about other cultures and see commonalities while building writing skills.

http://www.eduplace.com/kids/hme/k_5/proofread

-Improve students' proofing skills and knowledge of grammar with this fun and easy-to-use site. After a short animated video introduces Power Proofreading, students click the folder for their grade level and select a passage to proof. Each passage's errors focus on a specific skill, so why not preview the passages before class, and pick out the ones you want your class to practice based on your current grammar unit? Then, students simply click to delete, add, or edit as needed to correct grammatical and spelling mistakes.

http://thinktank.4teachers.org/

-Do your students struggle to break down a research topic into manageable subtopics? ThinkTank, a free tool from 4Teachers, helps students organize and refine a topic for research. Students click through six easy steps during which they define their topic, list several subtopics, and print a research organizer in outline form. ThinkTank is a great starting point for research for any major project, such as a biographical report, Science Fair, or unit project.

http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/comic/index.html

-Are you teaching about dialogue, narrative writing, or storyboarding? Check out this online tool from Read, Write, Think, a site sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the International Reading Association (IRA), and the MarcoPolo Foundation. Students can create one, two, three, or six panels of a comic strip, add characters, props, dialogue and background, and then print the entire project.

http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/

-Tales are categorized by themes such as Cinderella stories or Hansel and Gretel stories. Within each theme, students can learn about the history of the story, read an annotated version of the tale, find out about stories with similar plot lines, research the story in the arts (film, music, poetry, literature), see various illustrations of the story, and more. This is a great starting point for older students doing comparative studies on folklore.

http://www.wendy.com/children/

-Illustrated fables, folktales, fairy tales, and campfire stories are available for reading. The online text is large and very easy to read. Some areas have links that further explain the topic. For example, in the section on fables a student can learn more about Aesop and Ancient Greece by clicking on hot words that lead to links with brief explanations of the topic. Eleven stories are currently available.

http://www.bham.wednet.edu/bio/biomaker.htm

-Biography maker

http://www.chompchomp.com/

-Interactive grammar instruction

http://www.readingmatrix.com/directory/pages/

-Analyzing Text, Reading Comprehension, Audio and Text, Proofreading, Short Stories, and Vocabulary

http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/tools/reading-ms.html

-MS Reading Resources

http://www.learningmedia.co.nz/staticactivities/online_activities/homesweethome/#

-Read about a town in Australia where the people live underground. Then you can choose some activities that will get you thinking about what it would be like.

http://www.learningmedia.co.nz/staticactivities/online_activities/speakup/#

-Create a cartoon. You get to choose who's in it, as well as an issue or problem that your cartoon characters have to deal with.

http://www.eduplace.com/kids/hmsv/smg/index.html
-Spelling games for grades K-8