Welcome

Hundreds, if not thousands, of websites out there offer excellent teaching materials for middle and high school English teachers. This site picks through the best of what's out there and houses tons of resources and lessons, all FREE.

In addition, every week The Monday Morning Connection Newsletter delivers an engaging and time-saving lesson for middle and high school English classes. To start receiving this FREE NEWSLETTER sign up in the box to the left.

The most unique aspect of this site is the Premium Membership. If you find you just never have enough hours in the day, then Premium Membership is for you. As a former high school English teacher my main goal is to save teachers time. Premium Memberhsip provides teachers with an online personal assistant to do all those things that suck the time away from teaching. Need a powerpoint made? Simply send in a request. Want to find some new materials for a novel you are teaching? Just email us.

Simply searching through the wasteland of lesson plans can drain hours from your day. For less than $10 a month become a Premium Member and let the English Teacher's Friend do the busy work while you get back to what's important--teaching.

Updated: Student Publications and Contests

The new contests for the Spring offer a wide range of writing tasks from humor essays to playwriting.

Top Lesson Materials of 2011

Icebreakers—for start of the year and throughout

Test Strategies and Text Patterns

Sites for Students

10 Lesson Ideas for Sub Days

Vocabulary

Sample Curriculum: See page to choose your scheduling format

Common Core One Pagers: See the page to choose your grade level

Overview of 2011

Delivered 422 pages of lessons and resources through the weekly newsletters.
156,924 emails of Monday Morning Connections sent during 2011
Moved from 2,445 members in January to 3,285 members today.
106 Premium Members in January to 167 Premium Members today
Became an Affiliate with Scholastic’s Alliance for Young Artists & Writers
Presented workshops for 14 schools/districts – 300 teachers
Grand Prize Winner of the Pitney Bowes Small Business Makeover (THANKS TO YOU!)
Sent paperwork to become a Nonprofit (THANKS TO YOU!)
The top selling T-shirt: sold 88 WWAD—What Would Atticus Do
Personal—ran a 4G5K -- four generation 5K (with my daughter, dad, and 81 year old grandma!)

How You Can Start Saving Time

Educational Resources and Training for Teachers
The English Teacher's Friend produces engaging and relevant materials for use in the secondary English classroom. These lessons are designed to save you time while being highly engaging for today's student. Several popular workshops will show you how to use these resources to their full potential. Tamara's workshops receive rave reviews and are extremely affordable. Follow up for implementation is a key element of success in these workshops so this does not become yet another workshop that gets put on the shelf to think about later. Immediate impact on students and a new level of engagement evolves right away. See the workshop pages for more information.

Our Informative Newsletter
Register for the FREE newsletter, The Monday Morning Connection, which delivers a new lesson each week. These lessons are engaging for students and time-savvy for teachers. They are also targeted specifically for middle and high school English classes. We share latest developments in our field and provide highlights of great sites or resources for English teachers. These newsletters will keep you informed about virtual assistance programs, educational workshops, and upcoming events. Simply enter your email in the box at the top of the page to start receiving this FREE newsletter each week.

Premium Membership

Premium Membership is the primary reason why I created this site. The demands on teachers, especially English teachers, continue to rise while the time we are provided for teaching dwindles. We are forced to do more work after hours if we want to have truly engaging classrooms which means finding the latest articles and current events, videos and materials to bring to our students. To read about and explore new ideas for teaching, to search through the vast materials available to us, is almost a full time job itself. In fact, it is what I do for 20-30 hours each week.

This is where Premium Membership comes in. Premium Membership provides teachers with a personal online assistant to take care of all those things that take up your time. You tell us your needs and we deliver. Powerpoints, lesson ideas, materials, handbooks, ideas, suggestions, research--just tell us what you need. We take the busy work out of teaching. The only thing we don't do--grade papers! :) See the Premium Membership page for more details and start taking back your time today.

Sites Worth Saving

sitesforteachers.com - Top education web sites ranked by popularity

Delicious Account for English Teacher's Friend is a collection of all my favorite sites saved and categorized by tags.

Zinn Education Project (and their partners: Teaching for Change and Rethinking Schools) is rich with resources and is a must-visit site especially as curriculum moves toward a Social Studies/English common core connection.Excellent lessons and practices here to build social awareness in our classrooms.

My Vocabulary.com Contains an endless supply of lists, games, cartoons, puzzles, and more related to vocabulary. Great people running it, too!

English Companion Ning This site, run by Jim Burke, is a great place for collaboration and advice.

The NYTimes Learning Network provides excellent lessons and articles for grades 6-12.

The OWL (Online Writing Lab) at Purdue University is my go-to source for all things grammar and writing related. Excellent practices, explanations, assistance.

Quizlet is a great site to create and study flashcards through electronic cards, games, and more.

PBS Teacher has hundreds of lesson plans to connect with their programing or to use in general.