Free Web Resources for Literature Lessons and Homework

Has this ever happened to you? It's 10:30 pm. At precisely 8am tomorrow morning, you'll need to place a piece of paper in your English or Literature teacher's hand with work you've done about some book you were supposed to read. Maybe you read it and didn't get it. Maybe you never read the book. In any case, your blood pressure is about 250/500 right now. What do you do?

Or how about this scenario. You are a teacher and you've tried every way you can think of to spruce up that Literature unit, or just get a few simple ideas across. Maybe you need to find some good materials and resources to wrap up a book you've assigned. You're frustrated. You need some inspiration, or just a fresh perspective. Where do you turn?

Here are reviews of 10 websites for you to get free help, information, ideas, lesson plans and assistance. No cost, no committment, just solutions and fast! I've been a teacher for 22 years so this is from a teacher to a teacher or student. I try to focus on .edu and .org sites as they tend to be the most helpful.

(quote from site) http://www.bibliomania.com/ -Free Online Literature and Study Guides. Bibliomania brings you
the internet's best collection of classic texts and study resources. ...Bibliomania's reference section is where you can find, in one place, fully searchable copies of your favourite language reference books, including dictionaries (Websters), books of quotations (Grocotts), books of synonyms (Soules), a thesaurus (Rogets), dictionaries of literary sources (Brewers) and linguistics (Hobson Jobson), and non-literature reference books .

This site is clearly laid out with 2,000 texts free to read. This site provides free study guides, forums for students and teachers and free tutorial help via email. There are several good research helps listed. This site offers help with non-fiction, essays, poetry, crtiques as well as works of fiction.

http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/jcheek1/larts.htm For grades 3-8 students, you'll find study guides, cyberguides, games, activities, printable lessons, flashcards, grammar, parts of speech, sentence structure, elements of style, online reference guides, writing lesson plans and games and book study guides for Newbery winners and most commonly used classroom literature. Includes biographies and historical texts as well. You have got to see this site to believe it.

http://dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/World_Literature/ This is a huge directory of literature from all over the world. This site will be of immense help to the teacher of world literature in curriuclum planning and lesson design. It catalogs essays, fiction, poetry and other literature sources. This site cross-references articles and analyses of the works as well. Try this site for quotes you may need for your compostitons.

http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/bailey/worldlit.htm This site is helpful not only for world literature, but literature from different historical periods as well. This site organizes the literature chronologically in history. (Whowas writing whatand when andwhere.)

http://promo.net/pg/helpex.html#What-books Can't get a copy of the book you need? Here's an online library of e-books for you to download and print free. This is a grant and donation based site to put books into people's hands.

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/ Yes, this is an odd name, but I guarantee you'll remember it. Not all their resources are free, but if you peruse the sites offered here, you'll be able to assemble a variety of free resources and cover most all of your literature needs.

http://www.sparknotes.com/ Sparknotes is similar to Cliff Notes (that we all relied upon from time to time in the good old days). You can read chapter notes, character summaries, timelines, plot analysis, themes for many different frequently read literature pieces. This site offers discussion forums some mentoring as well. You will only be charged to print or download. It is free to read.

http://www.griffe.com/projects/worldlit/ another helpful site for world literature

http://members.tripod.com/~megan81/megan81.html Links to free online literature guides, composition and grammar help. This is a good home page to start from to link to whatever you need.

http://www.libraryspot.com/ All sorts of online library help in reference, booklists, ask the expert, almanacs, encyclopedias and links to other helpful organizations and sites for all your literature needs and questions.

These sites ought to help you get that paper into your instructor's hand in style.