Teachers who work with English as a Second Language learners will find ESL/ESOL/ELL/EFL reading/writing skill-building children's books, stories, activities, ideas, strategies to help PreK-3, 4-8, and 9-12 students learn to read.
Teacher Resources: Lesson Plans, Activities, and Strategies
4Teachers.org works to help you integrate technology into your classroom by offering free online tools and resources. This site helps teachers locate and create ready-to-use Web lessons, quizzes, rubrics, and classroom calendars.
This is a very popular book that can be found in many new teacher orientation programs to help teachers get off to a good star in the new school year. This link goes to the book's Amazon page.
An educational site offering 5000+ FREE printable theme units, word puzzles, writing forms, book report forms, math, ideas, lessons, and much more.
About.com: Make at Home Math Games
Links to many math games that use common items such as dice and playing cards. Game boards can be printed too.
About.com: Print and Learn Activities
Links to many printable activities and worksheets. Topics include coloring books, paper dolls, math and reading activities and games.
This resource offers comprehensive list of strategies for each phase of the comprehension lesson — before, during, and after reading.
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)
ASCD is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership association provides expert and innovative solutions in professional development, capacity building, and educational leadership essential to the way educators learn, teach, and lead.
Awesome Library: Multilingual Lesson Plans
A listing of lesson plans and multicultural classroom resources offered in many different languages, from Apache to Yiddish. Some languages require special fonts for correct display.
The BBC "Learning English" webpage offers English language-learning multimedia tools such as short courses and quizzes to test grammar and vocabulary. They offer some material in other languages, including Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, and Spanish.
This site offers free and reproducible current news articles and MP3 audio files, communication activities, partnered work, discussions, readings and vocabulary.
Center for Digital Storytelling
This site demonstrates how pictures are a visual means of communication in which we can retell the story using specific strategies. It also provides support for ELLs to grasp the elements of the story, including the characters, setting, and plot.
Dave's ESL Café is an Internet meeting place for ESL and EFL students and teachers from around the world. It includes news of interest to the ESL community, a job posting center, and resources for teachers and students, including an expansive grammar lesson section, a chat room, and a help center.
Dick Blick Arts: Multicultural Art Projects
Lesson plans for multicultural art projects submitted by art teachers.
Discovery Education: Puzzlemaker
Puzzlemaker is a free puzzle generation tool for teachers, students and parents where users can create and print customized word search, criss-cross, math puzzles, and more using their own word lists.
Dr. Jean: Classroom Activity Ideas
Dr. Jean Feldman is an educator whose website offers songs and activities for young children. Activities focus on early reading skills such as letter recognition, math, crafts, and songs.
Education Place: Graphic Organizers
Education Place is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's website for teachers. Resources offered include graphic organizers in English and Spanish, such as story maps, word webs, and KWL charts.
Education Place: Monthly Themes and Activities
Education Place (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's teacher website) provides themed monthly activities in this section of its site. Here, educators can find lesson ideas and other resources, all based around one of many monthly themes.
Education Planet is a K-12 Web services company designed to help teachers, students, and parents easily find and utilize teacher approved educational resources, web tools, and e-learning services. It features a database of more than 100,000 educational resources. Teachers use Education Planet to search over 16,000 lesson plans, utilize powerful teacher web tools, share teaching ideas, and learn more about how to integrate technology into curriculum.
Education World features a search engine that can be restricted to only search educational sites. It also offers news from USA Today, monthly site reviews, employment listings, and original content such as lesson plans, articles written by education experts, and information on how to make the best use of technology in the classroom.
Through The Educator's Reference Desk you can access AskERIC's 2,000+ lesson plans, 3,000+ links to online education information, and 200+ question archive responses. The Educator's Reference Desk provides a search interface for the ERIC Database, allowing access to over one million bibliographic records on educational research, theory, and practice.
Educator's Reference Desk: ESL Lesson Plans
This site contains lesson plans geared at English language learners. The lessons indicate appropriate grade levels for the suggested activities.
EduHound provides listings of materials and resources by keyword for a number of topics and content areas.
Since its inception in 1991, the George Lucas Educational Foundation has been documenting, disseminating, and advocating for exemplary programs in K-12 public schools to help these practices spread nationwide.
A menu of virtual reality experiences from exploring the Amazon to experiencing a black hole. Sites are set up like computer games and allow users to interact with the material.
A site loaded with free electronic fieldtrips on a variety of subjects such as Pearl Harbor, bats, butterflies, Biscayne National Park, caves, the Everglades and much more. Each fieldtrip includes a fieldtrip journal and evaluation form. This would be an excellent resource for building background knowledge before a similar fieldtrip.
This website from The Internet TESL Journal offers many kinds of ESL lesson plans and activities for teachers, including games, vocabulary exercises, and conversation practice.
English as a Second Language: Lesson Plans and Teaching Ideas
This site provides a wide variety of lesson plans, activities, and web resources for ESL teachers.
English Firsthand: Teacher Resources
This site, produced by Pearson Education, provides information about the English Firsthand communication course. It also offers links to student and teacher resources, including discussion groups, chat centers, and games.
A listing of lesson plan ideas and activities, archived from many resources across the Web.
ESL resources for English teachers can be found here, including printable flashcards, worksheets, lesson plan ideas, games, clip art images, and ESL jobs.
This website from The Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers features links to many music and language-building resources, including lesson plans, materials ideas, and research information.
This lesson plan from The Kennedy Center's ArtsEdge program demonstrates how pictures are a visual means of communication in which we can retell the story using specific strategies. It also provides support to help ELLs grasp the elements of a story, including characters, setting, and plot.
This comprehensive site includes content-based lesson plans, activities, recommendations on classroom materials, and discussion boards for working with minority students.
Everything ESL: Classroom Lesson Plans
Everything ESL offers more than 45 content-based lesson plans for beginning through intermediate ELL students. Subjects covered include literature, social studies, science, and holidays/culture.
Everything ESL: Modifying Lessons for ELLs
This template provides a guide for modifying lesson plans to adapt to ELLs' needs.
This site has short, helpful tips for the educator in a hurry. It offers an overview of a variety of techniques to improve the ELL student's learning experience.
Everything ESL: Study Skills for ELLS
English language learners may need help in learning how to study for content area tests. Here are some helpful techniques that you can teach them.
Everything ESL: Twenty-Five Quick Tips for Classroom Teachers
These tips will support ELL instruction before, during, and after the lesson.
Website offering free printable worksheets, games, puzzles, cards, calendars, and more.
Google for Educators provides a teacher's guide called "Google Tools for Your Classroom," a Google for Educators newsletter, and an educator blog and discussion group.
Google Images has thousands of photographs, paintings, and cartoons available online. Just enter the subject of the search and many selections will come up for you to browse.
Developed by the California Nutrition Network, this resource offers tools and resources for hands-on activities that promote student consumption of fruits and vegetables.
On About.com's Secondary Education website, you can find many icebreaker ideas for starting the school year and new classes. Many activities can be used for the elementary level, as well.
Interesting Things for ESL Students
A fun study site for English language learners with word games, puzzles, quizzes, exercises, slang, proverbs, and much more.
Free and online, multilingual picture dictionary with interactive activities in English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian.
Articles, research papers, lesson plans, classroom handouts, teaching ideas, and links are compiled in this monthly Web journal.
ARTSEDGE, the National Arts and Education Network, provides the tools to develop interdisciplinary curricula that fully integrate the arts with other academic subjects. ARTSEDGE offers free, standards-based teaching materials, as well as professional development resources, student materials, and guidelines for arts-based instruction and assessment.
Free printable math worksheets for many grade levels.
Lanternfish ESL is maintained by a group of ELL teachers in Asia and North America. Our aim is to bring printable quality resources to teachers and parents.
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day
Larry Ferlazzo maintains an award-winning educational blog and free monthly newsletter where he disseminates links to innovative Web sites for teaching ESL.
This site, produced by the British Council, has games, quizzes, grammar exercises, e-cards, and more to help parents, educators, and English language learners.
This website was created by the British Council for children who are learning English. Here they will find games, songs, stories, and many activities to help them learn the new language.
The Alliance organizations represent more than 10 million individuals engaged in providing, governing, and improving America's public schools at the local, state, and national levels. The Alliance is dedicated to helping those institutions and people who provide and govern public education work together to find the best way to respond to local challenges. The Alliance will strive to deliver a common message to all parts of the education system, align priorities, share and disseminate success stories, encourage collaboration at every level, and work toward long-term systemic change based on solid research evidence.
Make Beliefs Comix, created by acclaimed "Make Beliefs" author Bill Zimmerman, allows kids to create their own comics in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Latin.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts: Art Adventures
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts' Art Adventure program is an example of a collaborative effort between the museum and the public schools. The program's volunteers visit classrooms with art posters related to a specific theme, such as animals or celebrations. The site offers samples of some of the posters used.
Search Colorín Colorado
I recently found your website and it is very informative. You have found a way to teach ELLs in a more objective method and I applaud you for that. God Bless you all for your efforts to make our society aware of the need to teach English to those who come to make their dreams a reality in our country.
~ Arthur G.
