American Memory Project 
This rich collection of primary source material from the Library of Congress incorporates documents, audio, video, maps, and photographs into forty online exhibitions. Here you'll find information on everything from the Civil War to vaudeville to folk music to the Great Depression. This is an unbelievable resource for secondary level literature and social studies classes.  Today in History

ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theater's American Collection
This NCTE-sponsored companion site to Masterpiece Theater's American Collection television series provides background information and teaching resources for high school literature teachers and students. James Agee, Langston Hughes, Henry Adams, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, and Esmerelda Santiago are the featured authors on the site. For each author, you will find biographical essays, recommended links, online texts, lesson plans, and more.
Must see - Literary Timeline

Fact, Fiction & the New World
Discover the role of books in the making of America. This site is in English and Spanish and has over 100 images of explorers, writers, and printers. Topics include the exchange of languages between Europeans and the people they encountered as explorers and missionaries voyaged to the Americas. You can also see where Columbus made annotations in his books! Navigation through the site can be through an outline or the gallery of images. After reading through the site, try the interactive quiz Cabeza De Vaca's American Journey.

Literature & Life
Created by KTCA, Twin Cities Public Television, this site explores the Givens Collection, a unique assemblage of African-American literature celebrating the people, ideas and eras that these works represent. Read excerpts from writers from the days of slavery, the Black Renaissance and through to today. Also included are online study guides for teachers and RealVideo clips.

Mark Twain in his Times
This site focuses on how Mark Twain and his works were created and defined, marketed and performed, reviewed and appreciated. The goal is to allow readers to see what Mark Twain and "his times" said about each other. Contained here are dozens of texts and manuscripts, contemporary reviews and articles, hundreds of images, and many different kinds of interactive exhibits. Try the Mark Twain Memory Building game, even when you get a question wrong, there is an interesting friend from Twain's life to set you straight. Mark Twain in his Times

Native American Texts
The University of Virginia provides this digital archive of more than 150 texts by and about American Indians. The texts are organized by author, also searchable by keyword.

A. Pintura: Art Detective
Students grade 4 and up learn about famous artists, composition, style, and perspective as they play A. Pintura, a 1940s noir detective who helps Miss Featherduster identify a mystery painting. This interactive online activity is accompanied by a vocabulary list and study sheet. Eduweb's "Inside Art" also focuses on these topics and is linked from the above URL.

Color Matters
Can a black rainbow occur at night? Can color suppress your appetite? Find out the answers—and other interesting facts about color and color theory—at Color Matters. Aside from rich content on color theory, there is an excellent list of resources and an unusually helpful discussion board.

Crayola Art Education
K-6 teachers will enjoy this web site, which offers lesson plans, techniques for using a wide variety of Crayola products, opportunities to win prizes by submitting lesson plans, and a chance to join others in threaded discussions about using Crayola products in the classroom.

George Eastman House: International Museum of Photography and Film
Students of photography shouldn’t miss this online exhibit of photography from 1839 to the present. Collections are arranged by photographer, photographic equipment and related technologies. The collection of pre-cinema technology houses images from lantern slides, slip slides, stereo images, polyorama panoptique, zoopraxiscopes, and other uncommon images. The glossary is useful for explaining terms from technologies of long ago.

Hands On Crafts
This online studio allows children to learn about pottery, weaving, quilting, and basketry techniques and traditions. Visit Studio 1, the Pottery Studio, to throw a pot, pinch a pot, meet some kids who work with clay, and visit the Clay Lab for some funny facts and sounds. Studio 2 takes you to the basketry, weaving, and quilting studios. Click and drag quilt pieces to "sew" your own quilt online. Play the basket concentration game and learn more about basket weaving. QuickTime, Shockwave and Flash are required for some activities.

National Museum of African Art
Online versions of past and current exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art house an excellent collection of painting, currency, masks and figurative sculpture, ceramics, everyday household objects, hats, photographs, furniture, and more.

North Carolina Folk Artists
Meet six musicians from North Carolina, two blues guitarists, a Lumbee drummer and flute player, gospel singers, and an old time banjo picker. Each musician is introduced with a short Flash slideshow and samples of their music. This site makes extensive use of audio and uses Flash technology.

Pencil Page, The
Did you ever wonder how pencils are made? And just how do they get those little erasers on each one? Click through the Great Eraser Caper to see how. This site offers little known facts about pencils, like why they are traditionally yellow. Additional resources are provided for those sharpening their pencil knowledge.

Sand Mandala
Watch the creation of a sand mandala made in the Indian Temple at the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the Venerable Losang Samten. This Wheel of Life sand painting depicts the Tibetan cyclical nature of life. The painting construction link has a timeline to view the creation over five days. Use your mouse in the Wheel of Life Explained to learn what each section of the mandala means.

Story of Books, The
Sunshine Online offers a terrific lesson plan which lets students investigate the history of how writing and books began. Students also have the option of writing and publishing their own stories.

Waxed Out Candles and Candlemaking
Waxed Out Candles in Tallahassee, Florida, brings you this Web site designed to be an A-Z reference on candle making. Although the navigation of the site is somewhat confusing, it's full of useful information for novices and experienced candle makers alike. Learn candle making safety precautions, get answers to your FAQs, read step-by-step instructions for making particular types of candles, and learn about recycling old candles into newer projects.

What is a Print?
The Museum of Modern Art in New York shows how prints are made from woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, and screen prints. Each style includes a short description, a gallery of artworks, and an interactive demonstration of how to create the prints. Try your hand at carving a woodblock, inking a screen, and operating the printing press. This site is great fun to work with! Maybe you'll want to try your hand at real printmaking. Requires Flash, or choose the non-Flash version.

Children's Literature

BookHive
A guide to children's books for kids through 12 years old provided by the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, this site has hundreds of book reviews in different reading levels and interest areas. Users can search for books by author, title, reading level, interest area, number of pages, and illustrator. Parents can find special notes attached to some reviews providing additional information about the book.

Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site
This is a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics.

Official Peter Rabbit Site, The
Tour the garden to meet the characters, create one of Jemima Puddle Duck's greeting cards, play online games in Tom Kitten's playground, learn about Beatrix Potter's life and art, and see video clips in Squirrel Nutkin's film show. Games include a web search, fun with shapes, coloring and dot to do pages, and the Vegetable Patch Game, where you see how many vegetables you can eat before Mr. McGregor catches you! Beatrix Potter's images are worth the wait for downloading. Choose English, French, Dutch, or Japanese.

Read In!
Read In! promotes and encourages global literacy and the use of telecommunications technology in education by presenting a day in May (May 10, 2001) in which children's and young adult authors are available for a chat using Palace software, which can be downloaded for free. Throughout the year, you can access the transcripts of previous Read In author chats, view author profiles, and read columns from contributing educators focusing on literacy. The Active Reader Zone features games and activities.

Reading Corner
Our purpose is to write book reviews for readers in grades 2-8 that give a little more information than what you find in the library catalog.  We hope that you use this site and then visit libraries, talk to librarians, and most especially, read more books.

StoryPlace: Preschool Library
Preschoolers will enjoy the colorful graphics of these short stories. Each animated online story also has an accompanying online activity, take home activity and reading list. The themes of stories include gorillas, babies, pets, bath time, monkeys, and shapes. All the stories are also available in Spanish, which is also good practice for students in Spanish class. Flash is required for the stories. Parent Activities are in PDF format.

Fine Arts

40 Centuries of Architecture
Egyptian, Greek, Islamic, and Romanesque architecture are presented in categories of locality, subject, and time periods with a series of thumbnail images that are clicked to reveal a full screen size photo. Originally an Italian site, the English version also links to 1200 Years of Sculpture.

American Impressionism
The National Gallery of Art houses one of the finest collections in the world illustrating major achievements in painting, sculpture, and graphic arts from the Middle Ages to the present.

Art of the First World War
The aim of this exhibition is not to review the facts of the war, but to show how they were portrayed by artists on either side of the front line, and indicating the difficulties involved. Amongst the millions of conscripts there were painters of every nationality and every school of painting.

Art Room, The
Like art rooms in schools everywhere, this virtual art room is meant to be a "special" place. Within its "walls," kids are offered opportunities to create, to discover, to imagine, to invent, to learn, and to make their thoughts become things. In short, the @rt room is a place for kids to explore their inner and outer worlds.

Art Safari
Art Safari invites you and your child to explore the painting and sculpture collection of The Museum of Modern Art. This site encourages learning about art by looking and sharing interpretations.

ARTSEDGE
The mission of ArtsEdge is to help artists, teachers and students gain access to and/or share information, resources and ideas that support the arts as a core subject area in the K-12 curriculum. Teachers will find thorough information on current issues in arts education, curriculum resources and even an online arts community. ArtsEdge is developed under a cooperative agreement between the Kennedy Center and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students
When teachers combine oral history and community study with dance, theater, music, and visual arts a powerful vehicle is created to explore others’ and students’ own cultures. CARTS.org is a compilation of the best practices and resources of this successful approach to education. This site is also a hub for information and curricular materials for all of City Lore’s programs. From this site you can link to our City Lore website, and to our Place Matters and Peoples Poetry Gathering websites.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
What's not to like about 80,000 digital images of famous artwork available free on this Web site? What's more, the images are available at various sizes and resolutions, searchable by keyword, artist, country, or period, and browseable by medium/genre. Teachers guides are also included.

Focus on Sculpture
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis brings you the world of sculpture by introducing what sculptors do and what they create with. Most images of sculptures on the site can be clicked on for further information. There are also Make it at Home ideas to experiment with. Try making your own sculpture!

Investigating the Renaissance
This site showcases research performed by Harvard scholars on three Dutch paintings. The site offers an interactive program that demonstrates the ways in which computer technology can be harnessed to add to our knowledge about Renaissance paintings and how they were made.

Leonardo's Workshop
Join Carmine Chameleon for an ArtEdventure into the mystery of a missing painting. You'll find information about the Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci as you track down the stolen painting. As you find clues in Leonardo's room that lead you to information about his inventions, paintings, and interesting tools he used like a perspectograph. The toolbar at the bottom of each page takes you out of the Leonardo section but is filled with art activities and ideas, well worth investigating.

Make a Splash with Color
Created by the Tech Museum of Innovation and Adobe Systems Incorporated, this online exhibit introduces students to the many different aspects of color. Make a Splash with Color explores the 'ingredients' that make up color, the different sources of light that create colors and how our brains interpret color. Students can follow along through each section and interactively try out many of the theories presented.

Moshe Rynecki Virtual Museum, TheLeonardo's Workshop
Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943) was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto (Poland) in 1939 and later deported to a concentration camp in Majdanek where he died. This site features some of his surviving paintings of Jewish life in prewar Poland. They capture a culture that has been lost to the holocaust and modern ways.

National Museum of Wildlife Art
Using the Education section, find lesson plans and curriculum ideas for wildlife art for middle and high school students. Art Tales encourages students to tell stories by choosing a role of a frontier explorer, field guide writer, or museum curator. The Collection section allows you to search over 2000 images by artist, species, genre, medium, season of the year, and century. Featured artworks are exhibited on a monthly basis.

Odyssey Online
Odyssey Online is a journey through several museums to explore the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and 19th-20th century sub-Saharan Africa. Definitions and pronunciations to bold words are provided and you can click each highlighted image for more information about the object. Listen to stories, and find puzzles, games, and worksheets. The Teacher Resource Site helps teachers by providing ideas how to teach with museum objects. The site is aimed at elementary and middle school students. Adobe Acrobat, Shockwave, and QuickTime are required to view the complete site.

Rijksmuseum
This site is the product of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which houses the largest collection of art and history in the Netherlands. The core of the museum's collection are the paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, the Golden Age, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and Jan Steen. Take the virtual tour room by room or click on a favorite painting. Each painting can be enlarged. Click and drag your cursor and explore every inch.

Selected African American Artists at the National Gallery of Art
The Gallery's collection of American art includes 154 works by African American artists including Willie Cole, Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Edward L. Loper, Horace Pippin, Alma Thomas, and Charles Wilbert White. Paintings can be enlarged for better viewing and some also have detail images. There are bibliographies, narratives, and exhibition histories related to each painting.

Timeline of Art History
The Timeline of Art History provides an overview of the history of art as illustrated and represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. This site can be navigated chronologically or geographically. The date range begins approximately 15,000 BC and will continue through modern time. Key historical events are included on the timeline and specific objects from the Museum are highlighted. A locator map and links to additional information are provided.

Vincent Van Gogh Information Gallery, The
This incredible site assembled by David Brooks of Toronto, Canada contains more than 2,830 pages and 2,775 graphics, 100% of Vincent van Gogh's works (2,211 paintings, sketches, letter sketches, watercolors), a complete, online catalogue raisonn`e of Van Gogh's oeuvre! Provides a site overview, a chronological and thematic index to his works, biographical and other resources, links to recent news stories from around the world, and free downloads.

Web Gallery of Art
The Web Gallery of Art contains over 11,600 digital reproductions of European paintings and sculptures created between the years 1150 and 1800. A considerable number of the pictures are commented and biographies of the significant artists are given. A versatile search engine allows you to find pictures in the collection using various search criteria. A number of guided tours make it easier to visit the Gallery and to understand the artistic and historical relationship between different artworks and artists included in the collection.

Worlds of Art
Explore the world of art with the Getty Education Institute for the Arts and the Los Angeles Culture Net. K-12 teachers will discover an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to making use of the Internet to help bring Los Angeles's worlds of art into the classroom. Teachers outside of Los Angeles can also use the lesson plans and resources to build connections between art learning and the art worlds of their own communities.

Journalism

Ad*Access Project
The Ad*Access Project, funded by the Duke Endowment "Library 2000" Fund, presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad*Access concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II, providing a coherent view of a number of major campaigns and companies through images preserved in one particular advertising collection available at Duke University.

Daryl Cagle’s Pro Cartoonists Index
Political and editorial cartoonists represent varying opinions on current events, making for fascinating studies of art and culture. This site categorizes cartoons by topic so you can compare how cartoonists treat the same topic. Given the charged nature of many cartoons, some are bound to make you laugh and some will make you angry. It is interesting to see how international newspaper editorial cartoonists view the same issues. The Teacher’s Guide provides lesson plans and games for all grade ranges, which engage students as they explore and interpret the symbolism in cartoons.

Nation in Mourning, A
This site offers a detailed lesson plan for teachers of social studies, current events, and the language arts. Students will first reflect on what the deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Lauren Bessette mean to them. They will compose and read poems that will express what their deaths mean to us as a nation. Finally, students will interview members of older generations about how this event impacts them. (Note: users must complete free registration for access.)

Newseum: Interactive Museum of News
This elegantly designed site is the online companion to the Freedom Forum's museums in Virginia, New York, and California. Visitors to the site will find information about Newscapade, the museum's traveling exhibit program; exhibits currently showing at the museum; and lesson plans and other educational materials. Two online, interactive exhibits are "The Adventures of Chip Tracer, Cyber Journalist," an animated look at the top stories of all time; and "The Top 100 Stories," in which viewers can compare their own ranking of the century's newsworthy events with the rankings of noted journalists.

Reaching Out: The Evolution of Communication
This site shows the progression of communication from prehistory to the present. It includes the development of verbal and non-verbal communication, prehistoric cave drawings and hieroglyphics, semaphore, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and today's advanced computer and satellite-based systems.

Music

America Singing: Nineteenth Century Song Sheets
This Library of Congress site provides "song sheets" (lyrics without music) for more than 4000 songs that were popular from 1850-1870.

Classic Motown 1959-1988
A timeline tour guides you through the early years of the Motown Sound. Featured legends include The Commodores, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder. Browse through the timeline for major events, hear clips of songs in the Jukebox, and read features on young Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. If people want to know where you found this site, say you heard it on the grapevine.

Essentials of Music
This site serves as a supplement to the series Essentials of Music, published by W.W. Norton, but you don't need to own the book and record set to gain a basic education in classical music. There is a glossary of musical terms, biographies of composers, audio clips of numerous pieces, and descriptions of the six major eras of musical history: Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Twentieth Century. RealAudio is required for sound clips.

Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Instruments, A
You may have heard a bagpipe and a lute played but how about a Shofar, Psaltery, or a Sacbut? This site provides a description, photos, sound files, and additional resources for more than 30 instruments from the Musica Antiqua's (Iowa State University) collection of 12th to 17th century instruments. An additional benefit is that the musicians portrayed in the photos are in clothing of the period. A great resource for Medieval and Renaissance projects in school.

Melbourne Symphony Encounter - From Silence to Symphony
As you enter this site, you hear the orchestra tune for the concert. Watch a video clip of the conductor talking about his role, learn about different periods of music history, see where the different players sit and learn about their instruments. The descriptions include audio clips, construction and a history of the instrument. You will need Shockwave and QuickTime to get the full benefit of this site. Don't forget to check out the Music Analyzer and The Virtual Composer.

Music Heritage Network's Instrument Encyclopedia
Graduate students at the University of Michigan have created this useful musical instrument encyclopedia for those who can't remember what exactly a mbira is or from what country it came. You'll find easy to understand definitions detailing what the instrument is, where it originated and how it is used.

Music Notes
This 1998 ThinkQuest submission still has potentially valuable information for students interested in the history of music and individual instruments, music theory, different musical styles. There are also a few interactive games, midi files, and a threaded discussion board.

NPR 100
This National Public Radio site lists the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century. The site is eclectic, including jazz, pop, rock and roll, musicals, and "serious music." All the selections include brief descriptions, extended audio discussions, and excerpts.

Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song
This site from the American Memory collection highlights letters between Woody Guthrie and staff, particularly Alan Lomax, of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress from the years 1940-1950. There is a biographical essay, timeline, and images of items held in the collection. Woody Guthrie grew up during hard times of poverty, family tragedy, the Depression and the Dust Bowl; yet he left behind hundreds of songs most Americans know from elementary school, including "This Land Is Your Land." See the letter in this collection written on March 14, 1946 for a flavor of Woody’s humor.

Poetry

Academy of American Poets, The
This site highlights American poets with biographies, selected poems, and photos. If you have RealAudio, you can also hear some of the poets reading their works. There are also historical and thematic exhibits including Poetry with Children, Poems of Grief, and Poets of the Harlem Renaissance. If you have questions about publishing your own poetry, there is a section with suggestions for you.

American Verse Project
The American Verse Project assembles and archives electronic versions of American poetry prior to 1920. This collaboration between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press makes available the poetry of many, many authors whose works are no longer in print and whose poetry would otherwise be too expensive to use. The site is especially rich with minor poets, though works by Dickinson, Emerson, and other well-known poets can also be found.

Favorite Poem Project: Americans Saying Poems They Love
Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has traveled across the country recording more than 1,000 Americans reciting their favorite poems. Visit the site to access audio and video of the readings, to learn about Pinsky's purpose and journey, and to read interesting statistical information about just who's reading poetry these days. A list of the 25 most-selected poems is included as well.

HandSpeak!
Formerly known as the Sign Language Dictionary Online, HandSpeak is a visual Sign Language dictionary on the Web. There are new words added daily and you can browse previous entries by subject heading or alphabetically. The entries have the keyword, a short video file to demonstrate the movement of the sign, and what the sign means if it is not exactly what the keyword indicated.

Listen and Write Poetry
Did you know that Rap stands for Rhythm and Poetry? This site is for upper elementary students and gives practice with writing your own rap. Starter lines are suggested, practice with similes are provided, and students can take short quizzes on what they have learned. For teachers, there are notes on the site, printable versions of the poetry texts, and detailed lessons plans for each term in years 4-6. RealPlayer is required to hear the poems and raps. The high tech version requires Java and has a set of writing tools (rhyming dictionary, beatbox, scrapbook).

Poetry Daily
The Daily Poetry Association spotlights a new work each day from some of the U.S.'s premier and lesser known contemporary poets. Poems are chosen from books or journals which are currently or imminently available in print or online publications. Biographical information for each poet is also available.

Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee
We are the nation’s largest and longest-running educational promotion, administered on a not-for-profit basis by The E.W. Scripps Company and 243 sponsors in the United States, Europe, Guam, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, The Bahamas, and American Samoa.

Traditional Grammar: An Interactive Book
This site, hosted by Northern Illinois University, is a complete and free introduction to the basic syntactic structure of Modern English and the most common prescriptive errors in formal writing. The first half of the book is devote to syntactic structure, the second to prescriptive errors and how to avoid them. The initial screen lets visitors choose specific chapters.

Where Do Languages Come From?
The Exploratorium Magazine Online has a site about the origins and development of language. There are audio clips by a linguist about how language is studied and classified. You can see how words from different languages are related. Be sure to investigate the "Try This" sections for interesting activities related to language. Narration requires RealAudio.

World Wide Words
This site investigates international English from a British viewpoint. Sections include turns of phrase, topical words, weird words, articles, and questions and answers. Visitors can use the general index or search. A recent entry discusses the translation of Harry Potter into American English. The site provides links to other sites on words. Discretion is advised. This site, as does a dictionary, contains words that might offend some users. This site is all about English words and phrases—their meaning, where they came from, how they have evolved, and sometimes the ways in which people misuse them.

Reference & Research

Building Blocks of Language , The
The eight parts of speech, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections, are introduced with clear definitions and examples. Each part is further developed as you progress through the lesson. For example, the noun section discusses common and proper nouns, collective nouns, abstract nouns, and countable or uncountable nouns. Each section has fun activities to practice the skills learned. This site will be useful for upper elementary to high school students.

Copyright with Cyberbee
Intended for elementary students, this simple page provides eleven questions and answers to copyright issues for students in terms that are understandable. Topics include fair use, public domain, attribution, and use of photos, songs and video clips. Copyright is an issue elementary students need to learn about and adhere to proper use of materials. Don't postpone the issue until secondary school!

Graphic Organizers
This site is maintained by Greg Freeman, a former principal, teacher, presenter and trainer and provides guidance is using different types of graphic organizers: webs, concept maps, matrices, flow charts for different purposes: describing, comparing, contrasting, classifying, sequencing, causal, and decision making. The site also includes news and reviews about related books and software.

KidsNet
KidsNet is a national non-profit clearinghouse and information center devoted to children's television, radio, audio, video and multimedia. Media guides alert you to quality curriculum related programming. Study guides for many programs are provided. Programs are selected for their educational material, creativity and for promoting critical thinking.

Media Awareness
This Web site provides parents, teachers, and librarians with practical information and hands-on activities to help give kids the "cyber smarts" they need to make wise and safe online decisions. In addition to classroom resources and handouts, there are sections related to teaching kids to be safe and responsible online, authentication of online information, and online marketing to kids and privacy issues. The teachers' section has frameworks and lesson plans for grades K-12. The site is also available in French.

Mississippi Writers Page, The
The Mississippi Writers Page is a showcase for the many writers, both past and present, who have called the Magnolia state home. Biographies of the writers, information about their books and other publications, and bibliographies of other information sources (including literary criticism) are among the features available here. It is an ongoing project.

Outta Ray's Head: Middle and High School English and Library Lessons Online
If time is short and you need lesson plans fast, this is the place for you. Ray Saitz, a veteran English, history, art, drama, and special education teacher, has created this site with you in mind! As a teacher tired of finding lessons with little depth on the Internet, Ray decided to develop a truly useful site by bringing together a collection of lessons that are "tried and true," that really "wor"k in the classroom. You'll even find the rationale behind each lesson, handout and evaluation.

Pulitzer Prizes, The
Search the database of Pulitzer Prize winners since 1917. You can find winners and nominated finalists by year, category, name, publication, or citation. Learn about the background of the man and the prize. Check out the year you were born. Have you read anything that won that year?

TILT Texas Information Literacy Tutorial
TILT is a Web-based, tutorial focusing on fundamental research skills. Although designed for college students, high school students can benefit from the information literacy skills presented. Students are taught three groups of skills related to research: selecting appropriate sources, searching library databases and the Internet, and evaluating and citing information. Each of these skills is emphasized in a separate module with text, interactions, and a quiz. You don't need to register, you may sign in as a guest. Choose from two versions, with or without plug-in (Shockwave Flash and Director).

TIME's Top Artists & Entertainers of the 20th Century
Start with the Introduction to get background information on the 20th Century, then choose a name from the sidebar to learn about specific individuals, or use the timeline found in the Century section to explore some of the seminal moments of the last 100 years. Articles about artists and entertainers who influenced the Twentieth Century include Jim Henson, the Beatles, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Graham, Louis Armstrong, and Pablo Picasso. With QuickTime 3, you can view video clips. The clip from Lucille Ball's Job Switching episode never ceases to be hysterically funny.

Verbix
Verbix is linguistic software that conjugates verbs in modern and extinct languages and allows you to learn the verb grammar, conjugation and inflection of over 50 different languages. It is designed to be a reference for foreign languages students. You can conjugate regular and irregular verbs (shown in red) in all tenses and find equivalent words in other languages. The site provides general information about the language and its origins.

Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive
Housed by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, this Whitman archive has biographical material, the poems and prose, images of the manuscripts, notebooks and letters, and reviews. Other resources include classroom activities and student projects, bibliography, and a gallery containing digitized facsimiles of all known photographs of Walt Whitman. Visitors can search the archive.

World Literature

Bulfinch Online
This site, which provides the complete text of Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry, and Legends of Charlemagne, is maintained by Bob Fisher. The text of each of Bulfinch's studies is linked to explanatory notes. Also included is a biography of Bulfinch, a list of cited poets and poetry, and brief descriptions of recommended editions of books.

Digital Dante
The ILTweb Digital Dante Project is a long-term effort of the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University to prototype and develop an online, multimedia Dante-related academic resource combining traditional elements of scholarly research with new communication and presentation possibilities enabled by networked digital technology.

Grimms' Fairy Tales
Step into the world of the Brothers Grimm, but beware of the dangers that lurk in the woods! The tales the brothers collected in Germany were often frightening and cruel. This National Geographic feature brings you 14 tales based on a 1914 translation. Click on the treasure box to find information about the Grimm brothers, a map, an activity for kids, and the list of stories, some with audio.

Legends
You'll find Robin Hood, King Arthur, Beowulf, Sigurd, El Cid, and a host of other popular legends of literature here. There are pirates, swashbucklers, selkies, and fairy tales. This site includes primary sources, commentary, additional resource lists, and illustrations of many characters in the legends. En garde!

Writing

Building Blocks of Language , The
The eight parts of speech, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections, are introduced with clear definitions and examples. Each part is further developed as you progress through the lesson. For example, the noun section discusses common and proper nouns, collective nouns, abstract nouns, and countable or uncountable nouns. Each section has fun activities to practice the skills learned. This site will be useful for upper elementary to high school students.

Fact, Fiction & the New World
Discover the role of books in the making of America. This site is in English and Spanish and has over 100 images of explorers, writers, and printers. Topics include the exchange of languages between Europeans and the people they encountered as explorers and missionaries voyaged to the Americas. You can also see where Columbus made annotations in his books! Navigation through the site can be through an outline or the gallery of images. After reading through the site, try the interactive quiz Cabeza De Vaca's American Journey.

Guide to Grammar and Writing
Run on sentences, modifiers, punctuation, spelling rules, paragraph and essay writing, if you have a grammar or writing question, you can probably find the answer here. If you can't find it yourself, there is an expert who will help, just Ask Grammar! Check the online textbook, Sentence Sense, for practicing your writing skills. You can also try over 150 practice quizzes to test your grammar, spelling, and punctuation skills.

Online Writing Lab (OWL) From Perdue University
Need a refresher on punctuation, essay writing, or parts of speech? The Perdue OWL site has more than a hundred "handouts" on topics related to the writing process. Although the site is intended for university students, many of the topics will be helpful for middle and high school students. These concise topics can help by serving as introduction, reference, practice, or review. Find useful pointers on how to start, write and edit paragraphs, essays, research reports.

Write Site, The
Developed by Greater Dayton Public Television, the Write Site was created to make the process of telling a story fun through a multimedia language arts curriculum. Specifically designed for middle schoolers, The Write Site allows students to take on the role of journalists—generating leads, gathering facts, and writing stories—using the tools and techniques of real-life journalists. Teachers can also download lesson descriptions, task cards, graphic organizers, and checklists for classroom activities.