The Best of ClickSchooling!® Language Arts

By Diane Flynn Keith

ClickSchooling is a free e-newsletter that provides a daily review of an educational website that parents and teachers can use to help children and students learn every subject imaginable. Diane Flynn Keith has been publishing ClickSchooling since 2000.

Here are some of the best Language Arts websites she has featured in ClickSchooling that you can use to give your kids a world-class education.

Note: ClickSchooling makes every effort to recommend websites that have content that is appropriate for general audiences. Because websites change, parents and teachers are STRONGLY CAUTIONED to preview the sites for suitable content, and then explore the sites TOGETHER with their children or students.

ClickSchooling Language Arts

National Right To Read Foundation
Contains most of the information you would ever need to know about teaching your child to read.

Great Book Index
Classic books in e-text that you can download or read online.

Gamequarium - Language Arts
Pick a topic from the Language Arts game menu that includes:

• vocabulary
• sentence structure
• spelling
• punctuation
• word fun
• parts of speech

Click on one of those categories and you will be presented with a menu of various games that teach and/or drill kids on particular concepts. Click on a game title and you are whisked to a website where you can play that game -- and have fun while you learn! Most of the games are designed with elementary school work (grades 1-8) in mind.

Children's Storybooks Online
This award-winning site, Children's Storybook Online, contains original stories with illustrations for young children. There are riddles, puzzles, and coloring activities that are coordinated with the stories as well.

Homeschool Radio Shows
For all of you who want to listen to wholesome, entertaining old-time radio adaptations of classic literature and stories -- this website is for you! The Erskine Family are homeschoolers and offer this website where you can sign up for their free weekly newsletter that contains a link to their "Living Books for the Ears" audio program. These vintage, historically accurate adaptations of books, short stories and poems are ½ hour dramatizations aired in the 1940s on the radio show, "Family Theater." Some of the stories that are offered include: Treasure Island, Jane Eyre, Robin Hood, Moby Dick, Rip Van Winkle, Pinocchio, and many more!

QUIA - English
For all of you looking for fun, interactive games to reinforce English language skills -- this site is for you! When you get to the site you are presented with a menu of games to choose from that reinforce skills such as:

• recognizing homonyms
• making contractions
• irregular verbs
• idioms
• Greek & Latin root words
• homographs (words with more than one meaning)
• parts of speech
• prefix skills
• singular & plural nouns
• grammar terminology

Click on any topic, and another screen pops up with a game, or a menu of games -- from matching to concentration to word searches to flashcards to you name it.

Vocabulary.com
This site offers lots of free vocabulary activities, games, puzzles, lessons, and exercises designed to improve anyone's vocabulary and to prepare students for the PSAT, SAT, GED, and ACT tests. Learning vocabulary words has never been easier or more fun.

Handwriting for Kids
This website offers basic instruction and free practice worksheets for learning to print and write in cursive. It has links to additional websites that contain information, hints, printable practice worksheets, different styles and methods of printing and handwriting, as well as shopping carts for handwriting books. This site really provides everything you need to teach your kids how to print or write cursive.

School Scrabble Activities
What a find! The National Scrabble Association offers this website that contains all kinds of language arts activities, developed for schools, that you can use at home. Every 2 weeks a new post appears with new, simple, and fun activities for teaching students about grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. They also archive the activities online that include games and lesson suggestions for: word origins, compound words, foreign words, single vowel words, prefixes, suffixes, adverbs, Greek roots, Latin roots, silent letters, antonyms, adjectives and much more!

Parent's Guide to Storytelling This website offers a complete guide on to how to become a competent storyteller. Step-by-step lessons on how to choose a story, create the images, and explore characters helps you create stories you can tell right away.

Grammar Gorillas
This website offers a grammar game to help students learn to identify parts of speech. Choose the level of play -- beginning or intermediate. You are presented with a sentence that contains highlighted words. You are asked to click on the word that is a noun, or a verb, or an adjective, etc. If you click on the correct answer - the gorilla guide gets a banana. If your answer is incorrect, you are advised of the correct answer and invited to try again. This is really a computerized version of ditto drill sheets -- but the computer animation and interactive design makes it a whole lot more fun to learn the parts of speech.

How To Write A Basic Essay
This website takes you through a complete course of study on how to write a basic essay. Lessons include: Choosing a Topic, Outline, Thesis, Body, Introduction, Conclusion and Finishing Touches. Click on each lesson and you will see a step-by-step explanation of how to accomplish each task.

Outta Ray's Head
This is an excellent literature site for older kids (Grades 7 & up). Ray, a teacher, has lots of literature based lesson plans and writing ideas for a variety of novels and stories like 'Lord of the Flies,' 'The Great Gatsby,' 'Huckleberry Finn,' and books by authors from Shakespeare to Vonnegut. Many of the lessons include free, printable handouts.

The Children's Literature Web Guide
Here's a great reference site for parents who need suggestions on good books for kids to read -- and ideas for study using books. It features information on the latest children's books with commentary; it lists the year's best books and award-winners. It's an extensive reference guide so bookmark it for repeated use

Lil' Fingers
For all parents with toddlers who want to use the computer just like the grown-ups do -- here's a site that's sure to please. Lil' Fingers website contains computer picture storybooks. The site has large buttons to make pointing and clicking easy for little hands using a mouse. When you click on a storybook selection the story loads quickly -- keeping little attention spans in mind. The print or text is big. The pictures have bright colors and are animated to surprise children as their parents read the story to them. Most have a sound narration option as well. At the end of each story there are recommendations for similar picture books that you can purchase online or find at your local library.

If you find a dead link, please notify us by sending an email to ClickSchooling@Homefires.com.