It’s Wednesday, and time for Language Arts Homeschooling Resources. Check out the Recommended Website if you have used these resoueces let me know what you thought of them and why.
Recommenced Website: Shakespeare Online (Grades 7-12, with parental supervision) This website offers all of Shakespeare’s works online along with articles and analysis of his life and works – and much more.
The site is produced by Amanda Mabillard who holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Alberta in Canada and focused on Shakespeare and Renaissance political philosophy in both undergraduate and graduate school. She also was the Shakespeare Guide on About.com, so some of her articles link to material posted there.
When you get to the site you’ll see the featured content in the center of the screen. Scroll down to “Why Study Shakespeare“? to start.
Back at the top, use the menu on the left side of the screen to access all of his plays and sonnets along with analysis, plots, a biography of Shakespeare scholars, and a fun selection of Shakespeare quizzes.
Use the menu on the right side of the screen to get the answer to the trivia question of the day, see the featured quote, the word of the week, and more.
The content here is comprehensive and a terrific resource for homeschooling families. Bookmark this one so you can return often.
Recommended Website: Typing.com
Age Range: 9 and up(Grades 4 and up, approximately; children with parental supervision) This ad-supported website offers a complete typing course (for beginners to advanced students) absolutely free! (Registration is recommended to save your progress.)
The program supports all major international keyboard formats, and displays key position and proper finger placement to help keep beginners from looking at their hands. In addition to practice exercises, there are several typing games that reinforce skills while they entertain.
Helpful tips are constantly provided to reinforce proper typing techniques. Typing tests are provided and students can track their progress with detailed graphs and statistics (if registered). As a student progresses, the program “learns” which keys cause the most difficulty and creates custom lessons focusing on the student’s top 5 most troublesome letters. When a student completes a lesson, they earn a virtual trophy.
As we mentioned, this program is ad-supported which is why it’s free. If you don’t want the ads displayed, there is a reasonable fee-option to remove the ads.
Recommended Website: Apples4theteacher – Literacy
Age Range: 5-12 (Grades 1-6 approximately, with parental supervision) This ad-supported website with resources for teachers and homeschoolers offers a variety of literacy games and activities.
Some of the games and activities include:
- Alphabetizing a List of Words
- Coloring Pages – Color Page Readers
- Dolch Sight Words – Flash Cards, Word Jumbles, Word Searches and Worksheets
- Homophones
- Language Arts Skills – Sentence Building
- Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes
- Read to me books
- Poetry for Kids (by theme)
- Printable Short Stories
- Teaching English as a Second Language – Spanish ESL
- Thematic Book Lists of Children’s Books
- Word Families
- Vocabulary Word Finds – Word Searches – Make Your Own
Don’t stop here though – this site includes interactive learning activities, quizzes, and more sorted by subject (arts, foreign languages, math, science, social studies), articles, and much more! Bookmark this site and return often.
Recommended Website: Summer Reading 2020
Age Range: All (All grades; children with parental supervision) If you haven’t checked it out, ThoughtCo is a wonderful resource for just about anything you can imagine. Today is Language Arts day and we want to spotlight the Children’s and Young Adult Books – Summer Reading Programs 2020.
When you get to the site you’ll see either a list or an article including:
- High Interest-Low Reading Level Books for Reluctant Readers
- Top 10 Fun Books for History Lovers
- Modern Fairy Tales for Teen Girls
- 8 Children’s Books That Make Great Graduation Gifts
- The 10 Best Summer Reading List for Teen Boys of 2020
- Interesting Facts About Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Half Price Books Summer Reading Program for Kids
- And so much more!
Find more resources on the left side bar. There is a lot here – return often to get the full benefit.
Recommended Website: Librivox
Age Range: All (All grades; children with parental supervision) Now that the weather outside is getting nicer here in the Northern Hemisphere, send the kids outside with some audio books! They can perch in a tree, skip rope, start a garden, have a little picnic, or even play hopscotch while listening to these wonderful classics.
Or keep a supply of titles handy for those days when you’re unable to read to them. With hundreds of completed works listed under the “Children’s Fiction” or “Children’s Non-Fiction”categories, there is more than an entire year’s worth of bedtime stories and read-alouds here, including the works of such well-known authors as:
- Aesop (Fables)
- Alcott, Louisa May (Eight Cousins, Little Women, etc.)
- Baum, L. Frank (Oz books)
- Burnett, Frances Hodgson (Little Lord Fauntleroy, Little Princess, Secret Garden, etc.)
- Carroll, Lewis (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, etc.)
- Collodi, Carlo (Adventures of Pinocchio, available in English and Italian!)
- And many, many more.
Click any title to see a brief synopsis before downloading/listening. But that’s not all! Parents may like to browse the other categories as well:
- Adventure
- Animals
- Biography
- History
- Spy Stories
- Teen/Young Adult
- and many others
This site can be searched for a specific book by title and author as well.
Note: There is an overlap between these books and the ones you would find in Project Gutenberg or Archive.org. This is because Librivox allows both of these sites to house their entire collection of completed works. However, Librivox maintains the best-catalogued and most easily searchable list of these titles.
Also, only Librivox itself includes a brief synopsis for each completed title, lists the works currently in progress, allows you to request email notification upon completion of desired books in progress, allows you to request specific titles, and allows you to participate in the recording and editing process and their lively forum as well.
Additional Note: This review focuses on the “Children’s” books. The rest of this site is not specifically geared for children, so parental preview and guidance is, as always, advised. Books are continually being added to this collection, so bookmark it and return often.
NOTE: As always, parents should help select material appropriate for each child.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
