Ms. Valerie Lynn Mickley
High school English teacher
Heritage Christian Academy

     These links will help any teacher find cool lesson plan ideas, find resources for poetry, find online literature stories, and find spelling words for high school students.  I hope these links are beneficial to you!

 http://www.favoritepoem.org/forteachers/index.html
     This site is about getting students excited about poetry again. I love reading and writing poetry, but SO many students seem to dread learning about it. In the past I've used my own methods, which have worked well, but this site provided some interesting ways to get students writing. I loved the idea of them watching videos (http://www.favoritepoem.org/thevideos/index.html) on the poems and then reflecting on them. I also enjoyed how the categories were broken down into elem., middle school, and high school. I often find many sites lump middle school and high school together, which I find annoying.

 
http://home.cogeco.ca/%7Erayser3/lessons3.htm
OUTTA RAY'S HEAD
Literature lesson plans
     Some of these were interesting; the one I liked the most was about song lyrics, which can also be tied into poetry. The lesson involved an Alanis Morissette song and having the students reflect on mistakes they have made. I'd encourage all junior high/high school teachers to check this one out. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm always looking for lessons using lit. that help reinforce re-life issues, morals, and ethics. I guess I was just really impressed with this one.
Alanis Morissette -- Connotation and Denotation
http://home.cogeco.ca/%7Erayser3/youbleed.txt

Lesson Plans Page
http://www.lessonplanspage.com/LAJH.htm
     Cool lessons on teaching the 8 parts of speech! The one part of my job that doesn't thrill me is teaching my students grammar. The curriculum we use have grammar workbooks (from Satan) that the kids hate and they STILL come away not knowing even the basics. I've worked hard in the past 5 years to teach grammar creatively and in a way to help them understand the material, and figure out its usefulness in their lives. I'm a HUGE proponent for teaching grammar in writing, but at my school I haven't been able to escape the workbooks. For those of you like me, this site had cool LP's on teaching grammar. This one was a cool one:
Adjective/Adverb "Taboo"
by Steve Garcia
http://www.lessonplanspage.com/LAAdjAdvTaboo912.htm

 
http://www.bornmagazine.org/mother.html
Born Magazine
      Well, this site was interesting, but I like how it takes poetry to the next level. Kids like to see their poetry “alive” in some way. I think this site is great for inspiring them. This was my favorite one that was listed on the main page. Be sure to check out part IV!
“A Birthday in Four Parts”
by Lisa Marie Brodsky & Bill Klingensmith

http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/humanities/list.html
     This is a site with complete help for writing and formatting research papers.

http://www.mel.org
     This site is SWEET! Students can research just about anything from this site; I frequently use this site for the high school students, while they're researching for research papers. Wilson Select Plus has many full text articles.

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/index2.asp
     This site is online cliff notes for most books you would need to look up. I use this site to double-check plotlines. I assign 6 book projects per year, and as well read as I try to be, I haven't read them all! I look up stuff about the books so I can make sure the student relayed the fact they read the book in their project.

http://www.freevocabulary.com/
     I firmly believe high school students should STILL have spelling quizzes and not merely rely on spell “cheat.” I use this site because it has 5,000 words frequently found on SAT, ACT and GRE exams. I use these as the kids' spelling words and at the same time, help pre-pare them for the aforementioned exams.

http://www.online-literature.com/
      This has FULL text lit. stories online; I've found this to be a great resource when you're focusing on themes or just want to read a really great story with the kids that isn't in their lit. books.