AWESOME STORIES

One site that I came across is AWESOME STORIES, which has a great deal of stories from many different genres that both teachers and students alike can enjoy.

The site is set up in a very manageable manner, and while you can sign up for a subscription to access all parts of the site, there are still some stories and lesson plans you can get to without having to pay. I think this is a great tool for teachers today, because it really would take a great deal of time to flip through an anthology book looking for a story to share with your class or form your lesson plan around, but with Awesome Stories you can browse through all different kinds of literature material in a manner of minutes. They have many different categories of stories to choose from, such as biographies, disasters, sports, inspirations, famous people, religions, flicks, and history, so if you already have a unit formulated you can come here and browse for a story that can easily fit into what you have already planned, and might better enhance the learning of the students.

Awesome Stories also features slide shows, videos, images, and audio clips that accompany some of the stories, so this site offers a way to bring media into the classroom as well. For example, you could choose a short story collection and then use the accompanying slide show of vocabulary words. This way there is much less stress on you when you are on a strict deadline trying to come up with a lesson plan.

Browsing through some of the stories myself, I would say this site is appropriate for a middle school teacher or someone teaching the lower grades of high school.