Quill for English and ELL / ESL

 

From Common Sense Education, "Using Quill Diagnostic is a great place to begin, especially with the recent additions of leveled ELL assessments and pre-AP and AP English surveys. Once students' needs are determined, mix and match Quill Connect (sentence combining) with Quill Grammar (writing mechanics) to support daily warm-ups, whole-class instruction, small-group work, or independent practice. The activity packs in Quill Lessons (writing collaboratively) and Quill Proofreader (editing passages) can serve as mini-lessons for whole-class writing workshops, particularly for older and more proficient students ... The instant feedback on writing will appeal to some students.  Exercises are adaptive and can be retaken multiple times."   Their readers have given the site 4 out 5 stars on 77 reviews as of today.  Of note is that Quill is a non-profit organization.  To see the website click here.  

If you used an idea from this website then buy Mr H a gatorade :)  Thank you

High School Chemistry Apps

If you are teaching High School Chemistry you might want to check out these apps if you haven't already.  To see the website click here.

Prepfactory

Do you or your students need help prepping for the ACT, SAT or  Middle School English, Math or Reading.  Prepfactory has organized videos for reviews and then tests.  Give it a  try by clicking here.
This will be the last post until January 9th 2017.  Have a great winter break.

CK 12 Flexbooks

Flexbooks is a new open source model of textbook creation that will allow schools, teachers, parents and even students create custom textbooks.  Materials include simulations, PLIX (play, learn, interact, Xplore) and practice. They have materials classified by course and then by topic.  Some of these are quite good depending on course.  Take a look by clicking here.

Ten Marks Again

Just reminding you junior math teachers and students that Ten Marks offers over 20,000 practice math problems that are aligned to the common core standards.  See my previous blog from November 19 2012 on this by clicking here.

Self Check Practice Activity

This is like "I have, Who has" activity.  The following is from Mrs. H. from Math Tales From The Spring.  Even though this example is from math it could be used in French for translation or English for key literary terms or many other things.

"This activity is called a Star Chain. When you are tired of doing boring book work or worksheets, but your students still need a little extra practice, try a Star Chain!

Each student will get 12 problems of anything you'd like to practice. For me, it was solving linear equations."

""Next, have students cut the problem cards apart.  After the cards are cut apart, students will pick any card they want to begin with. I usually tell them to pick the one that looks easiest to them. They work the problem and then find their answer at the top of another card. They tape the cards together. Continue the process until a chain is formed. If they do all the problems correctly, the last problem will match the answer at the beginning of the chain."

"The next day, we connected all the chains and strung them up on the ceiling. I'll probably leave them there until the fire marshall gets me!"

If you would like to use this in your class, just click here and change the questions to what pertains to your subject matter.

Here is an example from MathCathy using quadratics functions and translations.  

If you would like a copy of the handout sheets in pdf, click here.