ELA Essential Knowledge

The school year 17/18 will be my first year instructing inside of the classroom. While I have been working with K-5th grade students for 6 years now, it has always been outside, PE type, instruction. Next school year I will be a 5th grade English Language Arts (ELA) teacher and while I just found this out a couple months ago, I have began to build possible Web-based resources that I will use in the classroom. I hope other ELA teachers find this post both informative and useful. 

ELA essential knowledge can be broken into 5 key areas:

1) Reading- Students read and understand a variety of literary information and texts.

2) Writing- Students create a variety of written texts with main ideas, organization, and details.

3) Research- Students can access or locate a range of relevant and reliable sources and analyze, evaluate, and present ideas with supporting evidence.

4) Listening and Speaking- Students listen and respond to the ideas of others and can contribute their own perspective or ideas through conversation and group dialogues. 

5) Oral and Written Conventions- Students learn and use oral and written conventions of the English language when both speaking and writing. 

I plan to build these 5 areas in my students by engaging them in group/cooperative activities, building on their prior knowledge, using Web-based resources, and empower and encourage them to set personal goals for themselves. 

Below are some great resources I have recently learned about and am excited to try in my new 5th grade classroom. I hope some of you find them useful as well or perhaps you have personal experience using one of them and can provide me with feedback on successes or challenges using these in the classroom.

NewsELA

I recently discovered this resource when talking to a 4th grade teacher at my previous school. When I informed her I would be teaching 5th grade ELA, she suggested I look into this site. This is a great resource where students can read news articles about sports, science, social studies, health, arts, and more. What is so great about this site is that the entire class can be reading about the same topic, but in a format that is at their reading level. They have every article for every level that also have comprehension questions at their level. Teachers can instantly see their progress and use this as an assessment. The teacher can even add in annotations in the articles so the students can see these and you can be sure students are staying engaged. Another great feature is that they have every article in Spanish as well. This will be extremely beneficial to me as my school is 85% ELLs. Click on the link above and take a look at this great ELA tool.

No Red Ink
This is resource to help students improve their grammar and writing skills in a fun and engaging way. They pride themselves on getting rid of all the graded papers that are covered in red ink and so often get thrown in the trash. This is a way for the students to control their progress and review content as needed. As the students use this site, it gets to know them and their personal interests, such as sports, pop-culture, music, and their friends. Teachers can see progress and create assignment and quizzes that meet the specific needs of individual students.

To see a short video about this tool and the various features and resources it offers visit this hyper link: No Red Ink Teacher Resources










Scholastic 
This is a great resource that can be useful to teachers, students, and parents. This is a great site that offers a wide variety of resources ranging from unit plans, grade level and content specific lesson plans, printable worksheets, professional development training, top teacher blogs, student activities, and so much more. I know many teachers who use this resource on a daily basis in their classroom or to help them produce strong lessons. I know this will be a great tool for me in my classroom and to improve my teaching methods and strategies.