Curriculum Bank Lesson searchable by grade and subject. Often include videos 

Where to Search for Free hard copy books

PBS Learning Media has a free service called Learning Media.  Resources include pictures, video and interactive materials from a robust library of high-quality digital content from PBS, and a growing list of other contributors including the National Archives, Library of Congress and NPR. There are research-based resources, including videos, interactives, images, audio files and lesson plans. You can view three resources.  Then you have to create an account which is free. Can be filtered by grade level (Pre-K to 12+), subject (8), media type (document, audio, video, etc.), language (5) and accessibility (text, audio description, display transformation, etc).

Literactive is the leading provider of reading material for pre-school, kindergarten and grade 1 students available online. The program is comprised of carefully levelled guided readers, comprehensive phonic activities and a wealth of supplemental reading material which gradually develop a child's reading skills

Adolescent Literacy AdLit.org is a national multimedia project offering information and resources to the parents and educators of struggling adolescent readers and writers.

Rewordify is a free site that was developed by a special education teacher and former computer programmer for the purpose of helping students read complex passages. At its most basic level Rewordify takes a complex passage and rephrases it in simpler terms.video

Nuskool This is a site that uses pop culture as teaching moments for students.  Tailored to grades 6th-12th students learn a variety of subjects such as: Math, Science, English, etc through educational lessons based on the different elements of pop culture (video games, sports, films, etc.).

Age-Appropriate Stories for Struggling Readers? Story Shares offer free, age-appropriate stories for struggling teen and young adult readers. Browse their full library of titles!
MobyMax offers a integrated curriculum covering reading, writing, vocabulary, language, math, fact fluency, number sense, science and early reading. The program identifies student skill gaps with find-and-fix technology that targets instruction

ThinkCERCA offers CCSS-aligned lessons that promote close reading and argumentative writing for Language Arts, Social Studies and Science classes for grades 4 - 12. Some of these close reading lessons and corresponding student performance tracking tools are available for free.

Write Well is a web-based application with interactive templates that help students organize their thoughts and ideas, while writing more effectively. When students are finished with a project, it can be exported to Microsoft Word, Google Drive, or as a PDF. This is an application to help students write because it provides numerous supports and addresses different learning styles. It's drag and drop platform is perfect for tactile or hands-on learners. It interface is good for the students who need to visually see how everything fits together. For the student who is overwhelmed with managing their ideas and time, it provides the ability to focus on one section at a time. It is that it is cloud-based, meaning everything saves on the website and you can access this anywhere you have Internet access.

Listen and Read is a set of 54 non-fiction stories from Scholastic for K-2 students. The stories are feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into eight categories: social studies, science, plants and flowers, environmental stories, civics and government, animals, American history, and community.

Word Tamer Word Tamer has potential to get reluctant writers started on their way to crafting creative stories.It is a site for learning the process of developing characters, settings, and plots in creative writing. Word Tamer is set up as an interactive journey through a carnival of literary devices. As students move through the carnival they develop characters, develop a setting, and develop a plot for their stories.  Along the way there are videos to help students understand the roles of characters, settings, and plot development in crafting a good story.

Analyze My Writing.  Paste your text into Analyze My Writing and it will generate a ton of information about your writing. Analyze My Writing will give you a break-down of the readability of your writing on five indices. The analysis will include listings of the most common words and most common word pairs in your writing. A listing of how frequently you use punctuation and punctuation types is included in the analysis provided by Analyze My Writing. Finally, a word cloud is included at the end of the analysis of your writing. Analyze My Writing could be a great resource for high school and middle students to use in editing their works. Beyond the readability of the their papers students will receive important information about the words and phrases they have used repetitively in their writings.

No Red Ink - One of my favorite sites for helping students w/ Grammar and Writing skills.  NRI uses differentiated instruction to help students w/ problem areas and adjust accordingly.  Also, teachers can track students and generate detailed reports.

SparkNotes has videos on YouTube. The SparkNotes YouTube channel offers 23 short animated video overviews of literature commonly read in high school courses.

Grimm Fairytales It defaults to read aloud, but you can turn the audio off

Starfall - (grk-2) stories categorized by phonetic sounds

MeeGenius (gr 2-3) Six free clasic fairytales

Story Cove is a service that hosts audio and video stories based on the folktales from a variety of places and cultures. The stories are divided by their continent of origin. Each story is intended to convey a lesson on culture and society. The stories can be watched as videos or listened to as audio-only recordings. Applications for Education Story Cove provides a nice selection of lesson plans to accompany each of the stories in its collection. The lesson plans are in PDF form and include handouts for students. The lesson plans are categorized by story and by grade level, pre-K through grade

iStoryBooks is a free iPad, iPhone, and Android app that offers two dozen free digital storybooks for kids ages two through eight. Most of the stories in the app are adaptations of classic children's tales like The Ugly Duckling. The app gives you the option to read each story or to read along with each story while listening to the narrator.You can find the iOS version of iStorybooks here. Get the app from the Android Market. And now you can get iStoryBooks on Kindle Fire

LitCharts is a service that provides condensed outlines and summaries of classic literature. The outlines and summaries are far shorter than those you would find in Sparknotes or Cliffnotes. LitCharts color code the themes addressed and symbolism within a particular work. LitCharts provides nice outlines and summaries but doesn't provide so much information that a student can avoid actually reading the books you've assigned to them. In this way LitCharts could be useful study aids for students.  

Scholastic's Character Scrapbook provides a nice template that elementary school students can use to write about and reflect on the characters in their favorite stories.  The Character Scrapbook also allows students to create pictures of their favorite characters.

OuiWrite  OW is a very innovative site that students use to create a paper. While they are typing their paper OQ automatically searches for content they are typing about and find them sources.  These sources can then be cited or added as a bibliography automatically. Also, OuiWrite has other great features such as a: genius button (w/ a very cool counter point feature), built in dictionary/thesaurus, as well as the ability to check for plagiarism. Finally, OuiWrite has built in templates for creating different types of papers and bibliographies, as well as saving everything on the web 

Textivate site for getting interactive activities based on text This works by copying and pasting text (up to 500) and then clicking a button.  Then a wide variety of activities such as: fill in the blank, separate the words, tiles, and more can be chosen.

Into the Book - Excellent reading comprehension resource - Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing. K-4

Browser Books - "This website was created to allow beginning readers to read books on their web browser. Readers can click on the triangle in the lower right-hand corner of each page to turn the pages. If they are unsure of a word, they can click on it to hear a child's voice read the word to them. The books have been sorted by level and by subject according to the curriculum." (from the website)

International Children's Digital Library A massive collection of children books collected by the University of Maryland. A user-friendly interface that lets children search, browse, read, and share books in electronic form.

Literature Map provides a web of authors you might like based on authors that you already enjoy reading. To use Literature Map just type an author's name into the search box and webbed list of authors will be displayed. The authors' names closest to the author whose name you entered are the authors whose work you're most likely to enjoy.

AdLit.org (gr. 6 - 12) is all about adolescent literature. On AdLit teachers can find book lists, video interviews with authors, and a comprehensive list of strategies for teaching reading and writing. The strategies page gives detailed descriptions of how to implement each strategy. AdLit's strategies page also gives guidance as to the proper timing for implementing the suggested strategies.

60 Second Recap Motivating video 60 second recaps of novels for grades 7 - 12

Inspire My Kids is a neat website featuring stories designed to inspire kids to positive actions. Inspire My Kids uses videos, pictures, audio, and text to tell the stories of inspiring people and groups of people. You can find stories on Inspire My Kids by browsing through the list of values and topics. You can refine your story search by age appropriateness.

Writing 

Story Maker (gr. 1-3) Walks students through setting up characters and plot theme and then they can add pictures and story text.

NoRedInk  This is a site for helping students improve their grammar and writing skills. The way this works is through a variety of different features such as: high interest content, adaptive learning (differentiation), quizzes, student tracking, and more.

Story Creator (gr. 2-5) Create myths and legends with text, pictures and sound effects and record student narration options.

Create your own ebooks (gr. 6-12)

Simplebooklets this is a site that makes booklets. But it is so much more. These flash-based books are like mini website. As with regular books, you can add text and pictures. But you can also embed videos, audio, links, whole websites, calendars, widgets and more. The booklets are easy to embed into websites or blogs.

BiographyMaker Framework for writing interesting biographies

ACMI Generator - This is a great site for older students for digital storytelling and creating a storyboard scene with a script.

Circle Plot Diagram The Circle Plot Diagram can be used as a prewriting graphic organizer for students writing original stories with a circular plot structure as well as a postreading organizer used to explore the text structures in a book.

Essay Map The Essay Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for an informational, definitional, or descriptive essay.

Story Map This site has 4 maps for students to choose to design templates for them to create stories, these maps include: character map, conflict map, resolution map, and setting map.

Google has introduced their new feature for Blogger called "Google Scribe". click for review of options Google Scribe is text suggestions and auto complete feature, which can now be found in Blogger in Draft. Google Scribe helps you write more efficiently by suggesting common words and phrases as you type. Google Scribe supports Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. The language is automatically detected using the text in the post. Enabling Google Scribe is easy. Simply click the pencil icon in the toolbar within the Post Editor. After Google Scribe is turned on, suggestions will appear in gray as you type, and you can accept them by hitting the spacebar or by typing a punctuation mark, such as a comma, period or question mark.

Boom Writer - BoomWriter is a supremely engaging creative writing website that has students reading, writing and assessing content

Wiki Summarizer is a site that allows you to search Wikipedia, have articles summarized by key points, and provides lists of articles that are related to your original search.

Paper Rater  Paper Rater is a web tool that offers a robust grammar checker to find mistakes and correct them. It can also check to see if a students paper contains plagiarized text.Most recently, the site has added a feature that will try to
make suggestions so that students can actually improve their work.

Revision Revision makes it easy for students' assignments to be teacher or peer reviewed, and allows students to collaboratively work on assignments.

Story MapThe Story Map interactive is designed to assist students in prewriting and postreading activities by focusing on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution.

Literary Elements Map Students can map out the key literary elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution as prewriting for their own fiction or as analysis of a text by another author in this secondary-level interactive.

Persuasion Map The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.

NewsCred Create a free online newspaper

Zimmer Twins Edgar and Eva Zimmer are 12 year old twins who appear normal but have developed psychic powers. On the Zimmer Twins website, students can create their own cartoon movie endings to a story starter, or create their own animated movie from scratch. 

Fotobabble  is an online creation tool that allows students to create and share talking photos. It is very easy to use, just upload a photo, record your voice, and send or embed it.

Night Zoo Keeper  Users design an animal, either based on a real animal or something completely new. Then they write a profile bio for the animal and upload pictures. Then users are encouraged to write a story about their creature. There are also games and activities to play once you have signed in.

Comic Creators

Article: Comics in the Classroom

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
20 Ways to Use Comics in Your Classroom
More than 100 Editorial Cartoon Lesson Plans
Pictures and Cartoons from PRI's The World

MakeBeliefsComix Allows students to create comic strips up to four panels and print them. Supports English, Spanish, French, Italian German, Latin and more languages.

Pikistrips Free, well-designed software that lets you create comic strips from photos and save them for others to view. 

Toon Doo Create comic strips with clip art and speech bubbles

Charlotte's Web Comic Creator Create your own comic from Charlotte's Web. As with most comic creator sites a user has the ability to choose a layout, add characters, items, text, etc. Also, a user can create a comic with stills from the actual book.

Comic Master  create comics in the "graphic novel style" that is popular with a lot of kids in the ten to fourteen years old age range. Comic Master provides a drag and drop interface for students to build their comics on. Students can create free accounts on Comic Master to save their works and edit them whenever they like. Comic Master gives students the option to print multiple page stories.

Super Hero Squad invites kids to create their own super hero comic strips and comic books. The Super Hero Squad provides users with templates for comic strips and comic books. Completed comic strips and comic books can be downloaded and printed.

Kerpoof - Animated comics. Use the movie component to create animated stories with text and action. Teachers account allows you to register classes. Good lesson ideas at the account site.

BitStrips An easy to use comic building site. Students can use this webtool to create a comic cell, strip, or story and then share it with their peers or the world. Use with illustrating a scene from a novel, or even to help a student understand a complex theory such as gravity in science. http://www.bitstrips.com/

Make Beliefs Comix - "Art by Tom Bloom, comix by you." Existing galleries of art make it easy for students to focus on creating the story; Used online; Free. video http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/makeBelief/index.html

Creaza Your cartoon will be organized into a strip with several frames, which can be presented both on the web and printed out on paper. After registering click on Tools

ZimmerTwins Gr. 1-3 - Create cartoon movies

Comic Brush
A tool that lets you create and share a comic using any combination of your own drawings, photos and ready-to-use artwork.You can choose from the site's library of backgrounds, characters and speech balloons, add your own text or captions, and even your own photos.

Create Your Scenario
A tool that lets elementary students select characters, type lines for each one, save their work, and generate a playscript. http://www.kids-space.org/HPT/1a/11a.htm

Strip Generator various layout options

EasyBib offers a student writing guide. The writing guide is well written and easy to navigate. The guide walks students through each step of the research and writing process from locating credible websites to formatting and constructing an APA or MLA bibliography. Many teacher-librarians will be happy to see that the research section of EasyBib's student writing guide is not limited to Google search. The research section includes a list of databases and explanation as to why database research can be better than a Google/ Bing/ Yahoo search.