Every year, my Beginning/Intermediate English Language Learner class begins as a pretty stressful experience for me.

I’m never really sure what level of English-proficiency my students will have – state English test scores are notoriously useless, and the pandemic eliminated the tests even being given in the spring.

Every year I have to have a number of alternative plans for the class based on proficiency levels and, this year, on top of that, I had to have strategies in place on how to teach them all online (our district’s “standard” ELL textbook has an online set-up that can be said to have a lot to be desired).

Two weeks into the year, I now know what my plan needs to be.

For example, I’ll be able to use a lot of my unit on story (see Here’s My Entire ELL Beginners Seven-Week Unit On Writing A Story (Including Hand-outs & Links) ).  But I think I need to start with a story that has a more complex text than the book I usually use (The Story of Ferdinand).

I’ve been asking for suggestions on social media, and have gotten a lot of good ones.

However, to get started, just to make things easier on me, I decided to find a book on Epic! since our district is broke (see A BEGINNING LIST OF THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING ABOUT OUR SACRAMENTO DISTRICT’S FINANCIAL FIASCO), and I’m just up to figuring out how to get actual books to our students.

I found a good one, The Princess and the Warrior: A Tale of Two Volcanoes.

Then, I began searching for high quality teaching materials that have already been created for the book.

And I found Teaching Books.

I still can’t believe I had never heard of it before.

The free site has tons of teaching materials for many books, and the ability for teachers to easily modify any of them for posting to Google Classroom.

And, it’s been around for years!

I’m adding this info to The Best Sites For Learning To Write A Story.