How Resource Links Are Organized Here
Here’s a summary of the sections and sub-sections on each page of the LessonIndex.com directory:
On each page, resources are listed in three main sections: “Resources for Teachers,” “Resources for Students and Teachers,” and “Resources for All.” Near the top of the right margin are links to jump directly to one of these three sections (“Teachers,” “Students,” and “Everyone”). Pages for frequently-taught works may contain all of the sub-sections listed below, but less-popular works might have links in only a few sub-sections (and some main sections might be missing, if no resources are in the database). Here’s a description of most of the sub-categories (some, like “Test or Quiz,” are excluded because they’re self-explanatory).
Resources for Teachers:
- Teaching Guide: Generally includes multiple activities related to an entire work (a Unit Plan); for novels, this means more than one week of instruction.
- Lesson Plan: One or several days of instructional activities, organized in the format of a lesson plan.
- Teaching Ideas: These are usually brief descriptions of a single instructional activity, not written in the format of a lesson plan nor as a student handout.
- Activities: A single activity, which might be a handout, a worksheet, or a puzzle.
Resources for Students and Teachers:
- Criticism and Analysis: A critical or analytical article about the work, not written as instructional material.
- Vocabulary: A word list or vocabulary-related activity for a specific work.
- Study Guide: A moderate-depth exploration of a work, written for the student as the primary audience. (Some “study guides” may include several pages written for teachers.)
- Reading Guide: Usually superficial, with brief analysis and usually including a list of discussion questions.
- Web Links: Links to other resources on the internet, with little or no original content. (LessonIndex.com is a collection of several thousand “Web Links” pages.)
- Questions: A list of questions about the work.
Resources for All:
- Novel, Drama, Poetry, Short Story: “Versions of the work,” including links to purchase a novel or other work, or to read the full text of public-domain works online.
- Short Story Collection: If listed on a page for a specific short story, this collection should include that story.
- Audio Recording: Either “complete” or “abridged” readings of the work (often, this is not clearly indicated on merchants’ web sites).
- (Novel, Drama) …with related readings, … with Literature Connections: Versions of a work combined in a single volume with related works (which might include poetry, short stories, essays, or nonfiction articles).
- Comic or Graphic Novel, Movie, Screenplay, Movie, Abridged Edition, Annotated Edition: Modified versions (adaptations) of the original work.
Within each sub-group of products, works are shown in this sequence:
- Commercial works with “paid links,” usually followed by
- Links to “free” resources (Free), and then
- Commercial products with unpaid links.
This means that free lesson plan resources appear in “the middle” of each section, but are tagged with “(Free)” (in green text). All items that don’t say “free” require some payment, even if no price is shown on this web site.
I’ve updated the site so that a navigation menu now appears in the right margin, listing which types of resources are linked, along with the number of unique product titles and links for each type.