Areas of Interest

Reading Passages

Lit2Go
This site features children’s literature in both text and audio formats. The text passages are available as attractive PDFs that can be downloaded and printed for use in your classroom, with or without the audio files. Flesch-Kincaid grade level is provided for each passage, along with suggested activities, blackline masters, and Sunshine State Standards that may be addressed using the passage. There are over 3,000 passages available, including works at every grade level. Authors include Beatrix Potter, Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and such great American leaders as Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln.

Florida Then and Now
FT&N includes hundreds of reading passages about the history, environment, commerce, and people of Florida. Each two to three page text passage focuses on one topic and includes captioned illustrations, maps, tables, and diagrams. Each passage also includes separate documents for teacher notes, reading strategies, comprehension questions, and student activity sheets.

Floripedia
In this collection of texts of primary source documents from the history of our state, you’ll find turn-of-the-century reports on the early citrus industry, pamphlets advertising the state to northerners, historic newspaper articles, and first-hand accounts from Floridians involved in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War.

FCAT Express: Grade 4 Reading Practice
FCAT Express is designed to help teachers and their students prepare for the Fourth Grade Reading Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). It includes resources for teachers as well as practice activities and tests for students. Many of the materials are also available in a print-friendly format. Also available, FCAT Express: Grade 8 Reading Practice, and FCAT Express: Grade 10 Reading Practice.
Multicultural Education through Miniatures
This site includes photographs of handmade dolls and puppets from cultures around the world with accompanying stories, maps, and games. 


Literature

Lit2Go
Lit2Go is an unparalleled collection of free audio books, including children’s classics and classics for all ages. Here, you can find short stories, poems, and entire novels by Charles Dickens, Beatrix Potter, Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and H.G. Wells, among many others. Also included: Sunshine State Standards, Flesch-Kincaid grade level, and suggested activities.


Lesson Plans

No Strings Attached
NSA includes dozens of Language Arts lesson plans with video of each lesson being implemented in a Florida classroom. All NSA lesson plans include effective technology integration, Sunshine State Standards, and NETS Profiles.

FCAT Reading References, for 4th grade
This site gathers instructional strategies materials for fourth grade reading teachers, such as Cause and Effect, Main Idea, and Author’s Purpose. 

FCAT Reading References, for 8th grade
Here you will find instructional strategies materials for eighth grade reading teachers, such as Two Column Notes, QAR, and Semantic Feature Analysis.

FCAT Reading References, for 10th grade
This site gathers instructional strategies materials for tenth grade reading teachers, such as Graphic Organizers, EMQA, and Text Lookbacks.


Classroom Resources

Letters and Alphabets (from ClipArt ETC)
Over 800 illustrations of decorative letters and alphabets.

Clipart for Bulletin Boards, Newsletters, Presentations, and Activity Sheets ClipArt ETC
Tens of thousands of pieces of high quality images, painstakingly digitized from beautiful 18th, 19th, and early 20th century books and magazines. Here, you’ll find everything from aardvarks to zorillas, from the Absynnian crown to Zouave cadets, from Arabesque decorative flourishes to the crest of Zouche. 

Presentation backgrounds (from Presentations, ETC)
Have you ever gotten tired of the same old presentation backgrounds that came with your software? FCIT’s presentation site can open up your creative vistas with over 20,000 Powerpoint templates and Keynote themes, all free for classroom teachers.


Professional Development

Classroom Assessment
Free online course materials help classroom teachers learn about how to effectively design and use different kinds of assessments.

Tech Ease
Tech Ease is a collection of tech support articles and videos specifically designed for classroom teachers. The site includes printable tutorials and desktop videos on topics such as podcasting, managing your files, and printing.

Sunshine State Standards Search
Navigating the Sunshine State Standards has never been easier. Search by subject area, keyword, and grade level.

Educational Technology Clearinghouse - Language Arts
The ETC is a guide for all things educational and technological. This language arts page collects useful links to selected FCIT resources and other sites. 

Technology Integration Matrix
This site is a self-assessment tool for professional development in technology integration. Here, you will find example videos of technology in use at various levels.

ESOL Tapestry
Tapestry provides professional development resources for those teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). This is a series of video lectures by experts in the field.


About Your Guide

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James Welsh is a former elementary school teacher and a current doctoral student at USF in Childhood Education and Literacy Studies, examining critical media literacy in elementary education.


James' Blog

January 2nd, 2009

Upcoming Lit2Go Titles

Brian recently compiled this list of titles to be added to Lit2Go. Please take a look and see if there are other poems, short stories, novels, or other written works that you would like to see added to our archive of free audio books. Keep in mind that all works added to Lit2Go are in the public domain. As a general rule of thumb, most works published before 1922 and all publications of the federal government are in the public domain. We are particularly interested in adding works that are used by classroom teachers, so please send us any suggestions. If you’ve used materials from Lit2Go in your classroom and have ideas to share with other teachers, we would love to hear them and pass them along. Thanks!

Peter Pan by James Barrie

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maughan

Arrestee by Aeschylus

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

Confessions by Augustine

City of God by Augustine

My Antonia by Willa Cather

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekov

The Three Sisters by Anton Chekov

The Seagull by Anton Chekov

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov

Colonel’s Dream by Charles Chesnutt

The Conjure Woman and Other Tales by Charles Chesnutt

The Awakening by Chopin

Moll Flander by Dafoe

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Notes from the underground by Dostoevski

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevski

The Idiot by Dostoevski

An American Tragedy by Dreiser

Sister Carrie by Dreiser

Souls of Black Folks by DuBois

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas

Media by Euripides

The Bacchae by Euripides

Alcestis by Euripides

Madame Bovary by Flaubert

Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

Faust by Goethe

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goeth

Dead Souls by Gogol

Diary of a Madman by Gogol

The Federalist Papers by Hamilton

Jude the Obscure by Hardy

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Hardy

Siddhartha by Hesse

The Illiad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

Les Miserable by Hugo

A Doll’s House by Henric Ibsen

An Enemy of the people by Ibsen

Hedda Gabler by Ibsen

The Wild Duck by Ibsen

The Killer by Ionesco

The Rhinoceros by Ionesco

The Bald Soprano by Ionesco

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Washington Square by Henry James

Jolly Corner by Henry James

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Metamorphosis by Kafka

The Trial by Kafka

Amerika by Kafka

Critique of Practical Thinking by Emanuel Kant

Sons and Lovers by Lawrence

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

The Treatises of Government

White Fang by Jack London

Death in Venice by Mann

Dr. Faustus by Marlowe

Spoon River Anthology by Masters

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Paradise Lost by Milton

The Physician in Spite of Himself by Moliere

Tartuffe by Moliere

Le Misanthrope by Moliere

Beyond Good and Evil by Nietszche

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietszche

The Octopus by Frank Norris

McTeague by Frank Norris

Six Characters in Search of an Author by Pirandello

The Trial and Death of Socrates by Plato

Swann’s Way by Proust

Yeugeny Onegin by Pushkin

Letters to a young Poet by Rilke

Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand

The Social Contract by Jacque Rousseau

King Lear by William Shakespeare

A Midsummer’s Night Dream by William Shakespeare

Othello by Shakespeare

Twelfth by Shakespeare

Tempest by Shakespeare

Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw

Antigone by Sophocles

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Miss Julie by Strindberg

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Anna Karenina by Tolstoi

War and Peace by Tolstoi

The Death of Ivan Illych by Tolstoi

The Aeneid by Virgil

Candide by Voltaire

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

To The Lighthouse by Woolf

Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Vern

Resurrection by Tolstoy

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather

Cantebury Tales by Jeffrey Chaucer

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad

Robinson Crusoe by Dafoe

Return of the Native by Hardy Thomas

Bartleby the Scrivner by Melville

The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Desiree’s Baby by Kate Chopin

Night and Day by Virginia Woolf

Sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit by Joel Chandler Harris

November 11th, 2008

Florida During WWII

In a few weeks, we’ll be marking the 67th anniversary of the entrance of the United States into World War II. Your students may not be aware of the contributions of Floridians to the war effort or the very large impact World War II had on Florida, its population, and its economy. In the lesson resources found in Florida During WWII, your students will read about German U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico and Florida’s tourist hotels as makeshift military bases. You will find a downloadable reading passage for students, reading comprehension questions, a vocabulary list, lesson objectives, and suggested activities.

November 6th, 2008

Veterans History Project

Next week, we will observe Veteran’s Day. Thinking of the contributions and sacrifices of our veterans, I was reminded of a great lesson plan available on FCIT’s No Strings Attached site. This project involves language arts and social studies. It is intended for high school students, but could easily be adapted for younger students.

Veterans of Past American Wars Project

Image source: Exploring Florida

Image source: Exploring Florida

In this No Strings Attached lesson plan, a Florida high school teacher has his students interview WWII veterans. In some cases, the kids interview their grandfathers, but the teacher also went to local veteran’s organizations to find interview subjects for his students. This is a great example of a cross-curricular lesson. The students are developing language arts skills at the same time they are working within several social studies strands (i.e. Time, Continuity, and Change; Individuals, Groups, and Institutions; Civic Ideals and Practices; etc.). This lesson gives students an authentic context to practice reading, writing, listening, speaking, research, and interview skills. 

In addition to the information covered in the NSA lesson plan, the Library of Congress website offers helpful information for students on how to conduct oral history interviews.

Conferences and Events

National Council of Teachers of English
2008 Annual Convention
November 20-23, 2008
San Antonio, TX
International Reading Association
Reading Research Conference
Friday, February 20, 2009
Phoenix, AZ
International Reading Association
Annual Convention West
February 21–25, 2009
Phoenix, AZ
International Reading Association
Annual Convention North Central
May 3–7, 2009
Minneapolis, MN
Just Read, Florida!
K-12 Leadership Conference
June 28-July 1, 2009
Orlando, FL
National Council of Teachers of English
Literacies for All Summer Institute
July 9-12, 2009
Columbia, SC
Florida Reading Association
Annual Conference
September 10-13, 2009
Orlando, FL