Language Arts
Resources and Activities
by Mr Kurt S Candilas
MAE – English 2
February 14, 2014
Language Arts Resources
1. Turnitin.com
 is an excellent tool for guarding against plagiarism in
college and high school classrooms. Both student and
teacher utilize the database of more than one million
student-generated papers to determine the amount of
material that may be considered plagiarism.
Language Arts Resources
2. paperrater.com
 is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics
professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is
used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to
help students improve their writing.
Language Arts Resources
3. vocabulix.com
 provides numerous free tools for learning Spanish, German,
or English. Vocabulix can be used to create quizzes or take
quizzes online. Vocabulix provides dozens of drills and
activities designed to help students learn Spanish, German,
or English.
Language Arts Resources
4. Smart.fm
 is a free service designed to help you learn languages,
mathematics, and history independently. At it's most
basic, Smart.fm provides a flashcard-like service for
learning languages, learning formulas, and learning facts.
You can hear the flashcards read to you, read the
flashcards, and play games based upon the flashcards
you're studying.
Language Arts Resources
5. Forvo.com
 can best be described as an audio wiki for word
pronunciations. One of the problems with learning to speak
a language that is not phonetic is trying to figure out how
to pronounce the words. It hosts hundreds of recordings of
word pronunciations by native speakers. Currently there
are nearly 200 languages supported on Forvo.
Language Arts Resources
6. makebeliefscomix.com
 is a free comic strip creation tool that provides students
with a variety of templates, characters, and prompts for
building their own comic strips.
 Make Beliefs provides students with a pre-drawn characters
and dialogue boxes which they can insert into each box of
their comic strip.
Language Arts Activities
1. Pick a stick
 Each student comes up and picks a stick out; they have to
place the word in the right cup. Then, after all sticks have
been sorted, students can choose one stick from each cup
and create a sentence using all three words. A great
informal assessment!
Language Arts Activities
2. Writing Prompt Craftivities: Jungle Animals
 is a fun way to add a craft to a writing prompt.
 There is a craftivity for each of the following eight jungle
animals: zebra, monkey, toucan, giraffe, hippo, snake, tiger,
and lion.
Language Arts Activities
3. Prepositions: Vocabulary for Beginning Readers
 Students will pick an action figure from the collection and
take pictures of that figure in places that demonstrate
different prepositional phrases, i.e. under my desk, then
they will write the caption for each picture using the
correct prepositional phrase.
Language Arts Activities
4. Our Bubble Bursting Gum
 These project turned out to be a fun & creative way to
share several of the major standards. The project
incorporated the following: Timeline (The History of Gum)
/Facts/Opinions/“How to” Writing (Written by students for
parents to follow)/Compare/Contrast (Types of gum).
Language Arts Activities
5. Identifying idioms through pictures
Examples:
 Head over heels in love
 To pull someone’s leg
References
 Byrne, R. (2010). Free Technology for Teachers. Retrieved
February 11, 2014 from
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/05/10-resourcesfor-esl-and-foreign.html#.Uvl89vmSyVr
 http://www.pinterest.com/mickibranden/language-artsactivities/