Free Online Resource for Teaching Reading, ESL, and More: AwesomeStories.Com

With computers and the Internet being used more widely in schools these days, teachers have access to many great programs and websites that they can utilize to supplement their teaching. Having resources such as these are a welcome addition to a teacher's repertoire and simply finding the right resources is all it takes. In this second in a series, we'll be taking a look at a useful website for both ESL teachers and any other teacher who teaches reading.

AwesomeStories.com is a website that was created specifically for connecting readers to primary sources of information related to topics found in the stories, while providing opportunities for teachers to supplement their lessons in meaningful ways. In turn, students gain the opportunity to optimize their own learning by exploring these sources on their own and making connections that will give them meaningful understanding of the learning goal.

AwesomeStories.com is a wonderful online resource that contains a large collection of stories in eight different genres or categories. All of the stories come with an extensive archive of primary sources related to words, phrases or ideas in the stories. This collection of resources is the stated, fundamental purpose of AwesomeStories, which is to provide links to original documents, photos, and other pertinent information so as to connect the reader to the story in an objective, hands-on manner.

The stories on the website are divided into "channels" that are indexed in easy to find searches. The types of stories found on AwesomeStories include: biographies, disasters, famous trials, flicks, history, inspiration, religion, and sports. Throughout each story, students will find hyperlinks that will take them to a primary source of supporting information. For example, a student reading about the "Ancient Olympics" may see the following sentence:

The first Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece.

In the sentence, the words "first Olympic Games" may be a hyperlink to the official Olympic Games website, and the word "Athens" may link to a photo of ancient Athens or a map showing where the city is located. Where these hyperlinks lead can be up to the student, the teacher, or both. The breadth and depth of the sources found within the tales of AwesomeStories is incredible and will take a teacher and the students as far as they'd like to go.

AwesomeStories is markedly helpful in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Not only are many of the stories on the website written in easy to understand English, a good number of the stories provided on AwesomeStories come with audio narrations, which are especially helpful to students learning to understand spoken English. This feature makes AwesomeStories a stellar online resource for ESL teachers.

In addition to the channel indexing of the stories, AwesomeStories contains a wide variety of search options for finding the specific types of information and/or sources a teacher would like to focus on. Search options on the site include narrated stories, stories with video, document or image links, stories by related topic and much more. Suggested lesson plans can also be found here. Accessing all of the wonderful features of AwesomeStories.com requires users a registration, which is completely free.

Resource:

AwesomeStories

http://www.awesomestories.com/