Teacher Resources
Helpful Articles for Teachers (13) 
Lesson Plans (24) 
Resource List, Teachers (21) 
Teacher Development (8) 
Teacher Perks (3)
Without a doubt, many of us are feeling anxious as we navigate the uncertainty of the coronavirus (COVID-19). We're feeling it too, and we wanted to share some of the tools we're using to take care of our minds and stay grounded.
Enjoy this curation of meditations, sleep stories, music and more, all hand-picked to support your mental and emotional wellness through this time. And check back soon as we'll be updating these resources regularly.
Kikori is an app that provides teachers and parents with experiential and social emotional learning activities to help their students connect to themselves, their communities, and the world. Experiential education is LEARNING by DOING. The Kikori App has many easy to find Virtual and Physical Distancing activities to use!
The app gives educators tools + training to deliver experiential education activities and helps students connect with themselves,others and the planet. All public activities on this app are free for anyone to use in keeping with Kikori's vision to provide all students with the opportunity to develop the social emotional skills needed to thrive.
There are premium features that can be turned on that allow users to create, share, and favorite playlists and activities.
The National Geographic Education Resource library has Activities, Articles, Collections, Infographics, Lessons, Maps, Photographs, Units and Videos for PreK through High School in subjects including: Geography, Biology, Ecology, Health, Earth Science, Social Studies, English Language Arts, Engineering, Experiential Learning, Arts and Music, Anthropology, Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics.
The link will bring you to lesson plans but you can find other materials by clicking on the filters on the left.
Media, from video games and commercials to movies and social media, has an enormous influence on students’ behavior, thoughts, and health and well being. Educators see its impact every day in the classroom. How do we teach our students to become knowledgeable and responsible consumers and creators of media in today’s digital world?
Watch this on-demand webinar with Dr. Monica Burns, EdTech Consultant and Founder of ClassTechTips.com and Heather Inyart, Executive Director for Media Power Youth
Have students participate in a content-based scavenger hunt and take photos to record their findings. An app like GooseChase can make this even more fun.
Educational Ideas can be found here: https://www.goosechase.com/edu/game-library/
Roots & Shoots mission is to empower young people to affect positive change in their communities.
This site includes exclusive lesson plans, activities, 1-Click Actions, projects, an online course, reflections, and opportunities to stay connected. Whether it’s doing something immediately to support first responders, grow understanding through activities like Community Mapping, or finding ways to grow Compassionate Traits from home, we’ve got everything you need to grow hope at home and anywhere, every single day.
The Brown Bookshelf hosted the KidLit4BlackLives Rally that took place on June 4, 2020. Led by Kwame Alexander, Jacqueline Woodson, and Jason Reynolds, the Rally featured inspiring words, music, and numerous calls to action in support of equity and justice.
Here, we’ve compiled a list of resources you can use to help young people learn the social-emotional skills they need to get through these challenging events.
Back to School Supports
Coming Soon: Second Step SEL for Adults Resilience Module
We’re committed to helping both students and staff navigate the transition back to school this fall. For many, that includes coping with and recovering from the extreme stress and trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s why we’re releasing our field-test prototype of SEL for Adults (SELA) Resilience Module this August. The Resilience Module is designed to help enhance the natural adaptability and recovery of adults in the school community.
CommonLit’s Mini-Units. These units include over a dozen high-quality reading and writing activities and are a great way to keep students learning. CommonLit has developed over units for grades 3–12. Each of these 15 units include:
4–10 texts organized around an essential question
Daily lessons and questions for cross-textual analysis
A final writing assessment and an alternative assessment that encourages students to be creative
Student handouts with graphic organizers
Answer keys for educators
We have hundreds of standards-based lesson plans written and reviewed by educators using current research and the best instructional practices. Find the perfect one for your classroom. Every lesson plan on ReadWriteThink has been aligned not only to the IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts but to individual state standards as well.
Here at ReadWriteThink, our mission is to provide educators, parents, and afterschool professionals with access to the highest quality practices in reading and language arts instruction by offering the very best in free materials.
The Goal of the podcast is to:
A) Showcase some of the cool stuff teachers are doing and hopefully inspire the listeners to try new things or reflect on their practice in a new way
B) Make Listeners feel less alone in their journey of improvement as teachers who are doing amazing things share their not-so-amazing moments
Tips for Designing an Online Learning Experience Using the 5 Es Instructional Model
Covid 19 has educators and educational institutions worried about and preparing for possible school closures. What happens if students have to stay home for days or even weeks? How can we keep them learning remotely? What strategies and technology tools can teachers leverage to take their traditional classes online?
A creation and communication tool for students, educators and administrators to create interactive content, allowing those of all ages to visualize concepts and communicate creatively. Buncee empowers educators, administrators, parents, and all types of learners to achieve their remote learning goals. Easily create and share engaging activities, resources, and assignments directly with students, give students the tools to creatively demonstrate their learning, and connect with your entire school community through your virtual classroom.
Assign self-paced lessons students access anytime, anywhere. Students complete assignments independently while you gain insights into students’ understanding with post-session reports. Easily integrate with your LMS (i.e. Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology and more).
Note: with Nano Pod, you can also create your own lessons.
Comprehensive resources with an ability for teachers to bring their own materials
We cover standards across ELA, Science, and Social Studies with articles, textbook sections, fiction, videos and more. And teachers don't have to transition to new materials; they can upload their existing assignments onto the platform. Easy student access with supports for all learners and collaboration with peers
Actively Learn is easy for students to access at home, whether on a smartphone, laptop, or desktop. They can access scaffolding notes and media, an embedded dictionary, translation into over 100 languages, plus in-line peer discussion and shared peer responses.
Progress monitoring and easy ways to provide real-time feedback and grades
A site with hundreds of learning resources from Pre-K through Adult Learning categorized by grade and subject. For Teachers and Parents to share educational resources and support each other. Both Free and Paid resources exist on the site but the site itself is always free to use
Discover the Desert Online!
Discover the joy of the desert and the joy of learning alongside our expert Desert Museum educators and scientists. Each week is different- check back often for upcoming programs and make sure to register!
Free programs can be found at https://www.desertmuseum.org/center/edu/dtdo/free_programs.php
Paid, custom programs for your group are available Mon-Fri at 10:00 a.m. Choose your date and topic and we’ll put together a program just for you. https://www.desertmuseum.org/center/edu/dtdo/youth_programs.php
A Project by the Augusta Baker Chair | Dr. Nicole A. Cooke | University of South Carolina | @BakerChair
This project emerged out of the pain and frustration associated with the back-to-back deaths of #GeorgeFloyd #BreonnaTaylor and #AhmaudArbery in 2020. We must do better as a global society! #BlackLivesMatter
Almost 200 resources listed here - * Green = materials for youth
With protests over the violent deaths of black Americans dominating the news, it’s understandable that many kids are feeling scared, confused or angry about the situation. How can parents, many of whom are struggling themselves, help children process what they’re seeing and manage their feelings?
There’s no one right answer. That said, there are a few guidelines parents can keep in mind to help kids deal with troubling news about race and violence.
Black Lives Matter in Schools Resources for Educators: Books, Videos, K-12 Lesson Plans, and more.
CBS News This morning Youtube video about how to raise kids to be anti-racist and talk to them about racism. Protests across the nation over the death of George Floyd are forcing parents to have tough conversations with their kids about racism. CBS News contributor Ibram X. Kendi's upcoming book "Antiracist Baby" is about raising anti-racist kids. He shares how to talk to your kids about racism amid the protests over police brutality.
Author Jason Reynolds shares a powerful message about racism and antiracism. June 1, 2020
As part of its mission to advance excellent teaching in American schools, Annenberg Learner funds and distributes educational video programs – with coordinated online and print materials – for the professional development of K-12 teachers. Many programs are also intended for students in the classroom and viewers at home, with videos that exemplify excellent teaching. Annenberg Learner also partners with impactful organizations to provide other means of achieving this goal. As part of the Annenberg Foundation, Learner supports the Foundation’s mission to encourage the development of more effective ways to share ideas and knowledge.
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation operates the world’s largest living history museum in Williamsburg, Virginia—the restored 18th-century capital of Britain’s largest, wealthiest, and most populous outpost of empire in the New World. With schools closed, social distancing recommended around the world, Colonial Williamsburg closed, and those who can working from home, we’re gathering materials here so you can escape to the 18th-century, learn a little and find some entertainment. You'll find Videos, Live interactions, Virtual Field Trips, Music, Arts &Crafts, Cooking.
At the Colonial Williamsburg Education Resource Library for Teachers (https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/learn/teachers/), you’ll find a variety of materials for teaching and learning American history and civics, including videos, interactive learning games, lesson plans, and more. Video programs are designed for grades 4-8, but have been used successfully in other grade levels as well.
Pixar in a Box is designed to help students answer an age old question: "Why do I need to learn this stuff?" Our answer is found in a series of interactive lessons that demonstrate that the very same concepts that students learn in school are used to make movies at Pixar. We have content appropriate for grade 3 and up.
The Science Behind Pixar exhibition has been designed to let visitors experience the art, science, computer science, and math that Pixar uses to create their groundbreaking films. This website features some of the activities, videos, and images from the exhibition that describe the math, computer science, and science that go into making computer animated films. This exhibition was developed by the Museum of Science, Boston in collaboration with Pixar Animation Studios. There are free materials for hands-on, unplugged activities to use with this virtual exhibit at http://sciencebehindpixar.org/educators.
The National Council of Teachers of English Children’s Literature Assembly offers a bi-weekly blog with resources for preK-university educators. Each entry highlights a great online resource available for teachers and how it might be effectively utilized or offers a description of a short lesson using children’s literature that educators can use in their newly located classes.
If you’ve found yourself teaching in a distance-learning situation, especially if it’s been foisted upon you by circumstance, you’ll discover pretty quickly that distance learning offers different challenges from face-to-face instruction. And if you look online, you’ll find tons of ideas and resources that can help you tackle those challenges, so much that it’s easy to get paralyzed at the volume of it all. This is especially true if you’re expected to hit the ground running with very little notice. To help you, I’m going to take my best shot at sharing clear, carefully curated information on distance learning.
The teacher page features a two-week family engagement plan, complete with daily messages to parents. We’re also offering free virtual PDs and PLCs, led by teachers, for teachers. These will prepare teachers to lead Family-Educator Learning Accelerators, or FELAs, which are 5-10 week cycles during which teachers and parents share a game plan to help children reach reading goals. Can you think of a better way to support learning amidst school closures?
List of Distant Learning Resources curated by the New York State Reading Association
Edpuzzle is an easy-to-use platform allowing you to engage every student, one video at a time. We unlock the power of videos through simple editing tools and dazzling student data. The process is simple - find a video, add questions and assign it to your class. Watch as they progress and hold them accountable on their learning journey. We’re working towards a day where every teacher and student will be just a click away from an excellent online education. Together, we're creating a shared library of the highest quality interactive video lessons to benefit classrooms around the world.
A list of all the free resources Scholastic is providing for Teachers
As a mission-focused non-profit, it is Khan Academy’s duty to do our part to ensure students keep learning amidst the school closures. We also want to support teachers and parents to the best of our ability as we navigate this crisis together.
These schedules are meant to be templates that you could adopt as is or copy and modify to better suit the needs of your children, classroom or district. As you see in the schedules below, Khan Academy does have self-paced, interactive content--exercises, videos and articles--for students in every grade and in most major subject areas. It is all free and non-commercial and is made possible by philanthropic support from people like you. Teachers and parents can also use our teacher tools to monitor progress and assign specific work. This could be made even more powerful if it is complemented with Google Hangout, Zoom or Skype video conference sessions with teachers and classmates. We are also having daily (weekdays) 12PM PST/3PM EST live streams on Facebook and YouTube for students, parents and teachers navigating school closures.
TIME for Kids is committed to supporting educators and families around the world during this time. We have opened up all of our 2020 content and will continue to provide materials on a weekly basis through the end of the school year.
There's a new bad guy in town and his name is COVID-19, AKA, the novel Coronavirus. Although Coronavirus has already made many, many people around the world really sick, you don't have to feel helpless. Information is power. On this special PSA for The Story Seeds Podcast, Jason Reynolds, National Book Award finalist and the 2020 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, inspires us to be everyday superheroes in the fight to stop the spread of Coronavirus. He shares eight simple things kids (and their grownups) can do to fight germs everyday … plus a recipe for home-made hand sanitizer.
Closed Facebook group for K-12 educators so that teachers can share their experiences with digital learning plans and support each other. We're releasing a series of free online lessons through this platform that can be immediately distributed to students to ease the load on teachers and provide students with engaging content on media literacy. Our first lesson, Detecting Bias: Taking in the News From All Sides, is now available through the group's page and will help students critically evaluate news coverage. We've released a lesson on what social distancing is and how to build a plan to thrive in a world that feels isolated. More to come in the weeks ahead.
t’s hard to learn classroom material when you’re still trying to learn English. That’s why most English language learners (ELLs) struggle to keep up for a while. But when your child doesn’t progress the way she should, or has problems keeping up with her peers, she may not be getting the help she needs. Learn more about the unique challenges of ELLs with learning and thinking differences, and how you can help.
The coronavirus impacts everyone. But it creates added challenges for some people. That includes kids and adults with learning differences or disabilities.
We’ve created this resource to make the health crisis easier to manage. There are tools and information to help at home, at school, and at work. We’ll be providing updates on issues that impact learning, special education, talking with kids, and the workplace.
Khan Academy is a free resource for students, teachers, and parents.
We offer free lessons in math, science and humanities from kindergarten through the early years of college. Students can use our exercises, quizzes, and instructional videos to learn and master skills. They will get immediate feedback and encouragement.
Resources to support you during school closures.
We are having daily (weekdays) 12 pm PT/3 EST live streams on Facebook and YouTube for students, parents, and teachers navigating school closures.
Resource List for Parents and Teachers as well as Teacher Development Resources for English Language Learners
- Engage every learner with thousands of real-world texts that feature diverse perspectives and people all students can identify with
- Get visibility into usage and student performance with built-in activities and reporting
- Differentiate instruction easily with texts published at 5 reading levels
Helping you plan and continue instruction during the COVID-19 crisis. Start by initiating your complimentary access to Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, Newsela Science, and The Newsela SEL Collection through the 2019/2020 school year.
We’ve aligned all our content to national and state standards, and it’s flexible enough to support your district’s unique curriculum.
MSN Article on 12 world famous museums that are providing virtual tours and online exhibits.
Virtual Tours and Online exhibits for 500 Museums and Galleries compiled by Google.
One hour webinar by Robert Kaplinsky about reconsidering Worksheets for Elementary Students.
National Council for Teachers of English
RESOURCES FOR VIRTUAL INSTRUCTION AND ONLINE LEARNING
Online learning and instruction offer their own particular benefits and challenges at any time—here we suggest some resources and activities that may help those suddenly faced with teaching online.
Hello, friends! I’m Kate Messner, a former classroom teacher, forever-educator, and the author of more than three dozen books for kids. This is a library of resources for kids, families, teachers, and librarians to make sure that reading & learning can happen anywhere this spring. Some of you may be out of school as communities try to prevent the spread of a virus known as COVID-19.
You’ll find a growing collection of resources that include everything from first-chapter and picture book read-alouds (all shared with permission!) to drawing and writing mini-lessons. Be sure to check back often, as new resources will be added every day.
Thrive Market is an online shopping club that offers natural and organic products at WHOLESALE prices. Shop 6,000+ wholesome food, home, and beauty products curated just for members. Enjoy member-only prices, free gifts, samples, and deals every day
Our newest Social Impact initiative focuses our efforts on one group in particular: educators. Educators are pivotal to society – we entrust our children to them for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 10 months a year. And Headspace is committed to addressing some of the most pressing needs of educators such as reducing stress, increasing resilience and improving sleep.
The Benefits
✓ Helping educators live healthier, happier lives
✓ Inspiring educators to build and deepen their personal mindfulness practices
✓ Providing guidance and support to educators to foster mindfulness in their classrooms
Best Tools for Virtual and Distance Learning
Making virtual learning or distance learning work for all students is challenging. You can have all the best tools in place, but without equitable access at home for all your students -- and adequate prep and training for yourself -- it's tough to replicate a traditional, in-person learning experience. This list assumes you've got those problems worked out and are focusing now on how to set up an effective virtual learning environment -- either adapting your existing curriculum, or designing a brand-new one from the ground up.
Many teachers tell us they're new to remote instruction, but it's our K–2 teachers who are coming to us urgently with the following question: How do I turn my classroom into a distance learning environment when students have little or no experience using digital tools independently?