I recently posted a list of the five most popular books per grade level. If you are looking for a new twist to add zest to existing novel units, try literature cyber guides. I found this site when I was reading Pat's blog and gave it a "look see" as my mother would say. The site is definitely worth keeping on your radar and reviewing during the planning stages of a literature based project.
Yahoo!Kids offers a variety of educational activities and also provides links to help students with homework assignments. Kids can look up words, ask questions, conduct an encyclopedia search, view news slide shows, etc. The list is enlist. I can't wait to share this website with my grandsons.
I found math baseball at Funbrain.com along with a plethora of other interactive games. Since my first grade grandson takes a weekly math test over addition and subtraction facts, this will be a way for him to practice his facts that won't be as painful as flash cards. Students of all ages will love the Mad Libs reading section of the site and learn new words at the same time.
My sixth graders enjoyed working in groups as they came up with words for Wacky Web Tales. This activity is similar to Mad Libs and provides practice using Parts of Speech. It's pretty obvious if a mistake is made, so they carefully checked out the words before using them.
Another hit with my students was FakeOut! Again, they worked in groups to guess the definitions of words. Not only did my students look forward to guessing the definitions of words, but they also submitted fake definitions for future words. We looked forward to clicking on the website to see if one of our definitions had been chosen.