South Amherst Middle School Library

 

TEACHER RESOURCES

A-L | M-Z | Clip Art | Art | Health & PE | Language Arts/English |Library | Mathematics | Music | Science | Social Studies | Special Education


 

    
Check these links for resources and other information to enhance lesson plans and create learning activities.

General A-L

The purpose of this site is to provide teachers, educators with resources to work with their students or children.  It contains resources for reading, math, science, online reference books, special needs children information, and freebies for teachers.
A to Z Teacher Stuff is a teacher-created site designed to help teachers find online resources more quickly and easily. Find lesson plans, thematic units, teacher tips, discussion forums for teachers, downloadable teaching materials, eBooks, printable worksheets and blacklines, emergent reader books, themes, and more.
This school education site will help students, teachers and parents succeed in all school subjects.
Academic Skill Builders are online educational games that offer a powerful approach to learning basic math, language arts, vocabulary, and thinking skills.
This is a learning community of educators dedicated to the improvement of education.
Integrate the Internet into the classroom with excellent online resources found at this site. Resources include: curriculum ideas, research tools, treasure hunts, webquests, web links, articles, and more.
Alphabet Soup contains thematic units, holiday units, games and activities for kids; teacher and parent resources; and crafts, humor and recipes for all! Includes plenty of free printables!
The goal of this site is to promote literacy and creativity by introducing young readers, parents, teachers, and librarians to the work of "real, live" children's authors.
This site offers a collection of lesson plans in various curricular areas from Apple computer, with technology advice, material for parents, and examples of good teaching.
A how to hypertext on creating authentic tasks, rubrics and standards for measuring and improving student learning.
Awesome Library organizes 35,000 carefully reviewed resources, including the top 5 percent for teachers, students, parents, and librarians.
Part of the CRLS Research Guide this guide also gives students tip sheets.
Their mission is to empower beginning teachers and provide strategies to help them not just survive, but thrive in the classroom.
TeAchnology.com offers teachers FREE access to thousands of teacher resources, lesson plans, and rubrics.
This site is an online library of 1,200+ outstanding Internet sites categorized by subject, grade level, and format (lessons, activities, projects, resources, references, & tools). You can search by grade level, broad subject area, or specific subcategories.
The games in this category are designed to exercise the process involved in attending to and remembering information.
There are classroom management techniques tailored to elementary and secondary education, discipline ideas for new and experienced teachers, tips for handling special education, suggestions for getting organized, strategies for preventing behavior problems, sample classroom rules, ways of creating a caring community, and information on new products and services. This site has it all! 
Create online certificates or search through their templates and print them out for your students.
This site contains over 600 quality K-12 lesson plans.
CPAW network has guided teachers, students and community members in the use of state-of-the art telecommunications technology for use in the global classroom, for twenty-five years.
The Creative Teaching site is a non-profit site financed by the author to help develop creative teaching and professional enthusiasm.
Welcome to The Democracy Project, where visitors can take a kids tour of government, follow the President for a day, and decide which election issues are important.
For a positive, well-managed classroom environment, try these tips of eleven techniques to focus on a discipline program.
A reference for handling over 117 misbehaviors at school and at home.
A resource for teachers, students, and curious adults.
K-12 decision makers' technology and internet newspaper.
A free test making site for teachers. You can create multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer, and true and false questions. You can also edit your test at any time.
Top Education and Teacher Sites! Over 200 teacher sites are listed and they are ranked by traffic.
Educational Hotlists link to online resources that science educators and enthusiasts may find useful.
This is an annotated guide to education related sites on the web.
This site offers help from Houghton Mifflin Publishers.
Education World is the Educator's Best Friend. This resource includes: a search engine for educational Web sites only, a place where educators can find information without searching the entire Internet; original content, including lesson plans, practical information for educators, information on how to integrate technology in the classroom, and articles written by education experts; site reviews; daily features and columns; teacher and principal profiles; Wire Side Chats with the important names in education; and employment listings.

This site contains links to general education portals, thematic starting points, along with subject area and grade level portals.
As a leading national center for teaching about conflict and social responsibility, ESR has been providing effective and credible resources for teaching important current issues for over 20 years. Their Online Teacher Center provides teaching resources on a range of issues related to international security, conflict resolution, peacemaking, violence prevention, and social responsibility.
This site has great links for educators in the areas of counseling, general education, librarianship, family life, teaching, technology, subject areas, and more.
This site contains educational resources, lesson plans, clipart, worksheets, K-12 teacher websites, homework, multimedia, technology tutorials, and an education newsletter.
This site contains thousands of articles, videos, slide shows, expert interviews, blog entries, and other resources highlight success stories in K-12 education.
Expand your curriculum with their timesaving educational resources that use technology to improve instruction across all content areas and grade levels.
When you're learning about something new, it's nice to have more than one resource to explore. This web project provides "four to explore" for each topic.
From Information Please, this site covers all types of information.
This site offers free resources from Federal agencies.

The First Days of Middle School:

New middle school teachers will find a large resource at this site including tips for discipline, classroom management, suggestions for the first days of school, downloadable forms and letters links, and more.
Find links to government and other kids' sites here.
Contains games with an educational background.
A one-stop access to high quality lesson plans, curriculum units and other education resources on the internet.
Find online opportunities for teachers to collaborate including more than 750 online collaborative projects.
Find lessons and resources for teaching character education.
Use topics to find education grants or keep up with existing ones at this Department of Education site.
This site contains a large selection of various graphic organizers including an Inter-action Outline, and Anticipation/Reaction Guide, Chain of Events, Compare and Contrast, and the usual Venn diagrams.
A great site that shows how to apply graphic organizers to the classroom.
They inspire teachers with practical, teacher-created ideas and resources that you can use in your classroom immediately.
This site contains kids crafts, games, recipes, activities and more.
Find a wide variety of graphic organizers here with descriptions of each and tips on how and when to use them. You will also find samples along with strategies and links.
INFOhio Online Resources provides reliable databases for information & research, including newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, and more.
This is a community of educators networking for mutual growth and support in the teaching profession.
This site contains a categorized list of sites for educators with over 800 links including search engines, webquests and slide shows for computer training.
Their free library features over 20,000 web-based resources for K-12 students, teachers and families. Just click on a grade level and topic to view dozens of sites with tutorials, games, movies, simulations, primary source documents, and more!

 

Know It All

Knowitall.org is ETV's educational Web portal, a collection of fun, interactive websites for K-12 students, teachers and parents.

The Knowledge Loom is a place for educators worldwide to do the following: review research that identifies promising practices related to various themes, view stories about the practices in real schools/districts, learn to replicate the success of these practices in your own organization, add your own stories and knowledge to the collections, and discover supporting organizations and resources, including annotated Web links.
This Web site is dedicated to the idea that the very nature of information is changing, practically before our eyes. It is changing in what it looks like, where we find it, what we look at to view it, what we can do with it, and how we communicate it. Here you will find information and tools designed to help us redefine literacy for the 21st Century.
Learning Page provides a huge collection of professionally produced instructional materials you can download and print. Lesson plans, books, worksheets, and much more can be found here.
This site is a searchable directory of free online lesson plans and lesson plan resources for all grades and subjects.

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GENERAL M-Z

Contains hot links for educators organized by subject area.  Within each subject area are a lesson plan library and related resources .
Whether starting your year as a beginning teacher or returning as a veteran educator, try the tips here for excellent pointers on creating a valuable and successful middle school learning experience.
This site contains all kinds of computer lessons for grades K-8.
This comprehensive directory of Teaching Tools is a product of years of research by Rona Martin, classroom teacher and community volunteer.
National Geographic provides many links to quality educational materials.
The home page of Alan November, a promoter of the effective use of information and communication technologies that support and enhance learning for children and communities.
Find unique teaching tips written in "My teachers" on Dr. Kathie Nunley's web site for educators.
Kent State produced this list by grade level of academic content standards.
This is the Ohio Department of Education website.
This is the web site of the Ohio Public Library Information Network.
ORC enhances teaching and learning by promoting standards-based best practices in mathematics, science, and reading for Ohio schools and universities. ORC serves as a trusted source of easily accessible, peer-reviewed, high-quality, and effective resources.
The Ohio Treasure Chest is an online collection of thousands of websites which are high-quality, teacher-reviewed, interactive, and free. Each website is aligned directly to the Ohio Academic Content Standards in math, science, language arts, and social studies, and ready for use in your classroom.
PBS Teacher Source offers: free resources for teaching and learning, local resources and services, professional development, and PBS video products.
This site offers free lesson plans in the social studies area.
Create free educational worksheets such as flashcards, game boards, and quizzes to print directly from your browser.
Contains a directory that covers all of the major educational areas.
Create you own puzzles and games for your class assignments.
Horace Mann and nationally recognized teacher, Alan Haskvitz, developed this site of educational resources for teachers and students. It includes lesson plans to make reaching students and using technology easier.
RIF is the nation's largest children's literacy organization.
The web site covers what the PBS show does and more.
Create you own rubric or view examples at this site. There are also rubrics in Spanish.
View general rubric templates as well as rubrics for multimedia projects. Other links will give you bookmark management tips, critical thinking resources, etc.
Here you will find all kinds of product, process, and reading/writing assessments. Create your own assessment or look at other links for topics such as ESL assessment.
From About.com this site offers information on lesson plans, educational issues, teaching strategies and much more.
This site contains lesson plans, worksheets, activities, clip art and more.
This site developed for educators provides lesson plans, resources, a media catalog, field trips and more.
Find a handy reference here with national standards, or select your state for standards in each subject area.
This site gives information on student portfolios. A portfolio may be a folder containing a student's best pieces and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. It may also contain one or more works-in-progress that illustrate the creation of a product, such as an essay, evolving through various stages of conception, drafting, and revision.
“Our mission is to inspire creative problem solving, critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and logic.”  This fun and challenging site is targeted for students in grades 5 through 8.
This site is a source of free educational resources for teachers to use in their classrooms. The pages are full of resources, ideas, clipart, activities and lesson plans.
This site is a goldmine of teacher recommended websites and resources.
This site offers printable worksheets covering puzzles, brain teasers, word searches, word scrambles, match-up worksheets, crossword puzzle maker, telling time worksheets, money worksheets and printable calendars.
Teachers connect, on Teachers.Net offers over 150 unique "channels" for teachers by grade level, curriculum, region, and dozens of special interest groups.
This site provides lesson plans, how to projects, and power tools for education. You can also sign up for a weekly e-mail newsletter.
A web portal of educators that includes reviews of sites, teacher worksheets, downloads, rubrics and other teacher tools. You can also request a teacher newsletter delivered by email.
For 11 years they have been supplying educators around the world with free, high quality resources to make life easier in a digital world.
This great site for teachers includes sites from early elementary to high school, free stuff for teachers, history, math, and science sites, simulation sites, scavenger hunts, thematic units, virtual field trips, webquests, Power Point ideas, rubrics, and web page tools.
Thinkfinity.org is the cornerstone of Verizon Foundation's literacy, education and technology initiatives. Their goal is to improve student achievement in traditional classroom settings and beyond by providing high-quality content and extensive professional development training.
The United States Department of Education webiste offers information on government programs including "No Child Left Behind".
Virtual Tours is a collection of tours of the world, museums, exhibits, points of special interest and the U.S. Government.
The concept of WVIZ Ideastream is to bring together a variety of educational and public service media programs to leverage creative, technical and financial assets to better serve our communities.
Here is a large list of improv games for your students to loosen up in any situation, work cooperatively, or use as icebreakers.
This FREE tool allows educators to create a lesson, worksheet, or class page and immediately publish it online. Teachers can also set up classes and assign projects to students. Students complete the assignments by creating their own online projects or reports. Teachers and students can even add images and links to their pages.
A phone directory available through the internet.

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Clip Art

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Art

Search over 80,000 images by 7,500 artists, browse by artist, movement, medium, nationality or name
This site includes a timeline of art periods
Welcome to the Alphabet of Art. This site explains, in simple terms, the elements of visual design. Once you understand the Alphabet, you'll be able to "read" pictures and other works of visual art and understand why they work the way they do.
A lifetimeofcolor.com provides educators with a comprehensive resource of lesson plans, projects and techniques for teachers and educators!
Solve an art mystery as well as learn about six famous artists in this interactive mystery.
Find art lessons from grades Pre K-12. Includes the art site of the week, art news, art stuff, and more.
Learn about this organization and its programs, view artists's works, and read interviews with artists.
View the wonderful exhibits at this museum including activities for children. Online teacher resources are listed and the museum lends slide packets, videos, and lesson plans at no charge.

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Health & Physical Education

This is a health and physical fitness program
This web page was designed to provide teachers with ideas and activities. 
Find lesson ideas and other links at this site for physical education and health.
Physical Education Update.com is the website for physical educators who must know a little bit about everything related to sports, health, fitness and physical education...but don't have the time to stay up-to-date.
This is the health, physical activity, fitness and sports information website of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
This site is intended to be a concise reference guide, containing easy to understand explanations of the rules and guidelines of many sports.
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Language Arts

Find dozens of ideas for exciting, hands-on literary projects.
This is a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics.
Internet resources related to books for children and young adults.
Search for award-winning children's books (K-12) by age of reader, genre, time period, and more.
The mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to excite and inspire the world's children to become members of the global community – children who understand the value of tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online. They have over 324 free children's books online.
A newsletter linking a number of great English sites.
Find facts from the early years of mystery to the present, the history of mystery, and a mystery scavenger hunt.

Specifically written for middle school English teachers—a huge resource for implementing and maintaining an effective instruction strategy.
You will find lesson plans and resources for using mysteries to teach critical thinking, writing, and literature. For grades 7-12.
Contains links to other reading resources.
This site contains a large collection of book report ideas.
Find creative suggestions for responses to literature with suggestions listed at this site.
Find ideas for poetry lessons at this site developed by a teacher.
Designed for first grade, it allows children to have fun while learning to read.
Find thirty lesson plans for writing poetry, middle to high school level, following formats designed to allow fun, creativity, and enjoyment in student work.
Today Is... Read Write Think

ReadWriteThink is a partnership between the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Verizon Foundation. They are working together to provide educators and students with access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction through free, Internet-based content.
This is an online graphical dictionary where you can look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts.
This creative and interactive site are for kids, in grades 3 and above who love Mad Libs. Students can pick from one of over 20 different tales and fill in the requested parts of speech. They can then see how their answers were used to create a really wacky story.
Web English Teacher presents the best of K-12 English/Language Arts teaching resources: lesson plans, WebQuests, videos, biography, e-texts, criticism, jokes, puzzles, and classroom activities.
Poets and other writers will find many resources here including articles on advanced literary forms.

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Library

Here you can request a book or out of print book, have them make a search, and receive a price quote.
Excellent web sites that are recommended by the ALA including links to the Caldecott Medal, the Newbery Medal and other literature sites.
A meta search engine for finding new, used, or out of print books.
Your guide to children's literature and books.
Links to great sites dealing with book talks.
This site has great links for educators in the areas of counseling, general education, family life, teaching, technology, subject areas, and more.
Offers resources on all the major subject areas for students, parents and teachers.
Find book talks, booklists, awards, information on authors, illustrators and more.
Look at U.S. history and culture, world culture and resources, legislative information, exhibitions, and more.
Lists of book talks from preschool through young adult.

This site contains activities promoting reading.

A virtual idea factory dedicated to helping educators find motivating ways of teaching information literacy skills to children.

This is an easy to read document that you could have kids read.

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Math

Features a comprehensive set of interactive arithmetic lessons. Unlimited practice is available on each topic which allows thorough mastery of the concepts.
This web site was developed to help students improve their math skills interactively.
An animated, interactive dictionary for students which explains over 600 common mathematical terms in simple language.
Cool math 4 kids is an amusement park of math and more - especially designed for fun, fun, FUN
Find math lesson plans at this site.
More math lesson plans.
Explore math and create interactive lessons at this site sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
An excellent site with multiple on line math links.
Sponsored by Drexel University, this site is one of the best, most complete sources for math materials and resources on the Internet. Grades K-12 and beyond.
The goal of this math website is to help elementary school (Grade 1st through 6th) children boost their math problem solving and critical-thinking skills. MathStories.com has over 15,000 online and printable NCTM compliant math word problems for children to enjoy!

Find math resources, study guides and strategies, web quests, and much more.

This site contains math activities and games for teachers to use in their classroom. Design your own quizzes, worksheets, and flash cards.

Utah State University has made dozens of free PreK-12 math manipulatives available online. These applications help students visualize complex relationships and increase their understanding of everything from addition to Venn diagrams and beyond.

This online math resource is for students who may experience problems with math.  There are note taking tips, study skill tips, ways to reduce anxiety, and tutorials for students.
This is a resource guide for extending mathematical understanding in secondary schools and includes integrated lessons, math concepts, journaling, and supporting research.
This site contains math activities and games for teachers to use in their classroom.  Design your own quizzes, worksheets, and flash cards.

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Music

This is a site for kids to learn about composers and how to read music.
Creatingmusic.com is a children's online creative music environment for children of all ages. It's a place for kids to compose music, play with musical performance, music games and music puzzles
Find royalty free music connections at this site.
The genre sampler will take you on a tour of some of the more popular musical genres by first giving a general overview and then by listing well-known musicians and a sound sample.

The Library of Congress presents this site which tells the stories behind many of the songs that have now become part of the American national heritage.

This site introduces students to the instruments of the orchestra.
Students can create music using ordinary objects, hands, and feet, sound riddles of sound and more.
Creative teachers can use music to teach content across the curriculum -- to students of all ages.
They offer thousands of song lyrics, sound clips and teaching suggestions.

Contains more than 125 Free Songs and Poems to use with Children. 

 

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Science

Find science fair project ideas, science resources, study guides and strategies, webquests, and much more.
The Bugscope project is an educational outreach program for K-12 classrooms. The project provides a resource to classrooms so that they many remotely operate a scanning electron microscope to image "bugs" at high magnification.
Find science lesson plans at this site.
This site has nine instructional modules designed specifically by classroom teachers to teach science and math in integrated units centering around life-relevant themes. Eight of the units are designed for students in grades 4-6 and one is designed for high school students.
The stories and activities that comprise each unit in Maggie's Earth Adventures are presented to introduce students to actual environmental issues and to motivate students to delve deeper into the issues presented.
Find a series of science mysteries here. You must listen to all the symptoms and advise a diagnosis.
Find lesson plans, educational materials and interactive features here.
Find an extensive collection of science websites and lessons categorized by subject and grade levels.
The TryScience project team at the New York Hall of Science provides project management, content and collaboration management, technical and graphics management, and writing, editing, and research management for this multi dimensional site.
Find all kinds of weather information at this site including lesson plans, activities, and experiments.

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Social Studies

Find resources from ancient eras to the exploits of the Vikings, Columbus, Magellan, Drake, Cartier, etc.
An extensive listing of Civil War topics, which include quizzes, reading lessons, and activities.
Computer Pals Across the World (CPAW) is a non-profit global educational electronic network.
Find outline maps of countries as well as images of flags, continents, globe, USA and more.
This is a treasure of geography links that include time zones, flags of the world, cultural US history maps, rare maps, geographic dictionary, maps from around the world, teacher resources and much more.
An EBSCO Publishing database that contains primary source documents, speeches, and selected articles on notable figures from Canada and the US, historic video footage, web sites related to history, and teacher guides.
A great geography game that works well using a SMARTBoard.
Here is a teacher's eye view of over 7 million historical documents, photographs, maps, films, and audio recordings. You will find lessons, features, activities, and tips and tricks for using these collections in your classroom.
Look at US history and culture, world culture and resources, legislative information, exhibitions, and more.
This site contains hundreds of links appropriate for K-12 social studies topics.
Links to holidays for every month and almost every day of the year.
Find lesson plans, educational materials and interactive features here.
Another site for teachers that features lesson plans, an atlas of printable outline maps, standards, and other activities.
This new site offers documents that were an important part of our past. Classroom activities are also given.
This education resource is directed at teachers, parents, and students. Nearly 1,000 resources are offered including free lesson plans, field trips, and interactive learning labs, all searchable by grade level and subject.

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Special Education

This website offers many links and articles regarding special education with new links and articles frequently being updated.
This site supports school districts in using technology to provide differentiating instruction through the Technology Implementation Partnership.
This site, developed by Peabody University and Vanderbilt University with funding from the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs, provides modules with specific information in differentiated instruction, classroom and behavior management, accommodations, collaboration, disabilities, diversity, and transition.
This site, sponsored by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement, contains information about inclusion in the classroom.
The pages on this site aim to facilitate the sharing of good practice and ideas relating science education for students with special education needs.
This PBS site offers a variety of simulation activities that allow students to learn about disabilities in attention reading, math, writing, and also has resources.
This site developed by Texas Woman's University has a wealth of information regarding adapted physical education. It provides concise fact sheets regarding typical behaviors associated with a number of disabilities, program modification suggestions, and internet links.
The RISE (Resources in Special Education) website is designed to provide online resources, support, and answers to the questions, challenges, and issues teacher education students face when educating and working with students with special needs.
This site provides teachers and other education professionals with information and resources about gifted students as well as teaching students with disabilities.

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Updated:October 15, 2009