Lesson Plans. Interactive Games.
Professional Development. Family Education.
Navigating cyberbullying, privacy, safety, and other digital dilemmas are a real challenge for schools. But technology also provides incredible opportunities for students to learn, connect, create, and collaborate in ways never before imagined.
Your school can build a positive school culture that supports the safe and responsible use of technology with Common Sense Education’s K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum. Students can build skills around critical thinking, ethical discussion, and decision making. And you and your school can join thousands of others across the globe by getting recognized for your efforts.
Our turnkey curriculum includes comprehensive resources for students, like lesson plans, student digital interactives, and assessments, as well as professional development for teachers and materials for family education.
TAKE YOUR POET TO WORK DAY IS COMING: HERE’S OUR 2016 FREE COLORING BOOK!
In just a few short days, crayons, popsicle sticks and poets will come together to celebrate the best day of the year in workplaces around the world.
Take Your Poet to Work Day is next Wednesday, July 20. (It’s always celebrated on the third Wednesday in July.) For the past few years, we’ve marveled at all the ways poets can help you out at work, from counting money in the cash register drawer to serving up espresso in the coffee shop. We’ve even seen a few poets in the board room, on the construction site, and, yes, on the beach. (Because poets take vacations too.)
We’re excited to release our free Take Your Poet to Work Day Coloring Book, updated with our fresh new crop of 2016 poets, including William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Seamus Heaney, and Emily Brontë, Judith Wright, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
So get out your scissors and glue, and join us for a day of fun and celebration with poets in the workplace. And be sure to tweet us photos of your poets at work to @tspoetry on Twitter, with the hashtag #poettowork, and maybe we’ll feature you.
At the end of every academic year, we collect all the lesson plans we’ve published and list them in a kind of directory for teachers.
Below, you’ll find our 2015-16 offerings, but to scroll through all our roundup posts since 2010, just click here.
This year, we also featured a number of experimental educational features beyond our traditional lesson plans. Though they are not included in the lists below, you can find them here:
- A weekly article, quiz and writing prompt for ELL students
- Film Club documentaries of 10 minutes or under, with discussion questions
- Six contests for teenagers that asked for original political cartoons, reviews, raps, vocabulary videos, editorials and found poems.
- A Student Council comprising teenage Times enthusiasts who chose content and wrote pieces for us
- Our long-running monthly Poetry Pairings and Teenagers in The Times features
Happy summer, and let us know what topics you’d like us to take on in academic year 2016-17.
English Language Arts
Literature and Poetry
Literacy Skills and Strategies
Welcome to Novelinks
Novelinks is maintained by English teachers for English teachers interested in instructional routines and ideas for teaching the novel. Our goal is to provide educators with quality teaching materials that will enhance classroom instruction for a wide variety of commonly taught novels in middle through secondary schools.
Novelinks includes online as well as printed references to biographical, historical and critical insights on authors and their works. We also offer reading strategies and units for specific novels under the heading, reading resources.
Feel free to email us with your own contributions for us to consider as well as with any additional ideas, suggestions, and comments for improving the site.
In this day and age, where anyone with access to the internet can create a website, it is critical that we as educators teach our students how to evaluate web content. There are some great resources available for educating students on this matter, such as Kathy Schrock’s Five W’s of Website Evaluation or the University of Southern Maine’s Checklist for Evaluating Websites.
Along with checklists and articles, you will also find wonderfully funny hoax websites, aimed at testing readers on their ability to evaluate websites. These hoax sites are a great way to bring humor and hands-on evaluation into your classroom, and test your students’ web resource evaluation IQ!
Check out these 11 example hoax sites for use in your own classrooms:
- All About Explorers
- Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division
- California’s Velcro Crop Under Challenge
- Feline Reactions to Bearded Men
- Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus
- Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie
- British Stick Insect Foundation
- The Jackalope Conspiracy
- Buy Dehydrated Water
- Republic of Molossia
- Dog Island
Of all of these, my favorite is always the Dihydrogen Monoxide website, which aims to ban dihydrogen monoxide and talks in detail about its dangers. Only after a few minutes did I catch that dihydrogen monoxide, is after all, H2O!
If you do no know what to read next, check out these websites to help you find a book:
http://www.yournextread.com/us/ –type in author’s name and select a book, other suggestions will show up.
Other suggested websites:
Best books for Young Adults: http://www.ala.org/yalsa/booklists/bbya/