When you’re trying to find free ELA lessons and activities, nothing is worse than doom-scrolling during your planning period and getting absolutely nothing accomplished. I’ve been there. More times than I care to remember trying to find quality free ELA plans.

As ELA teachers, it often feels like everything is riding on us. Making sure students have quality lessons and activities while also learning to read and write on grade level feels close to impossible on most days. We need some help!

After what felt like forever, my district finally adopted an ELA curriculum. While we are immensely thankful, there are so many gaps that leave us still creating our own resources. But sometimes (oftentimes) there simply isn’t time to make from scratch.

That’s where quality FREE resources are worth their weight in gold. Here are my go-tos when I’ve hit a wall during planning.

The Classroom Hunt

I’ll get started with this website because it’ll save you some clicks!

I’m Madison, a middle school ELA teacher (+ my husband Andrew co-authors this website and is a music teacher, but you probably don’t need music resources today!), and we always try to give helpful lesson ideas and tips right here!

We’re constantly adding to our free resource library: To join, all you need to do is click right here!

The link will ask you to add your email, and you’ll be set up inside our Free Resource Library. We add to it pretty often, so I recommend bookmarking the page, so you can return when you want to!

You can also get some of our resources for free on Teachers Pay Teachers! View the video below to see how to easily find our free resources. Be sure to follow our store to get updated with any new freebies or sales!

CommonLit

This is my very favorite resource for finding quality passages on grade level. There is so much to choose from on CommonLit, and it’s all aligned to your standards!

I also love incorporating their assessments – or studying how their assessments are put together to create higher-order questions for my students when I create their quizzes and tests from scratch.

NewsELA

While I don’t love NewsELA quite as much as CommonLit, it’s a good second-place contender. In the last couple of years, they’ve placed a lot of their best content on a paid or subscriber plan, but they still have some great stuff!

I love using NewsELA for remediation or choosing text sets for students who might need a little help building appropriate background knowledge.

Pobble365

Looking for no-brainer quick write prep? Pobble 365 gives you a free daily picture with amazing prompts. Great for creativity!

This is their website hook, and I believe they live up to their promise!

Pobble 365 is a calendar of 365 inspiring images · Incredible images at your fingertips, every day of the year. · Spark their imagination and creativity!

Pro tip: Even though you only get one free picture a day, a quick Google Search: Pobble 365 Pictures will come up with amazing images from their archives! Easily come up with your own question or prompt for the ones you find!

Some of the image options really get students’ imaginations working!

Blooket

I’m sure you’ve heard about Blooket, but just in case, it deserves a mention! Blooket is a gamified archive of review questions made by teachers. Simply type in your standard or topic, and choose from a wealth of pre-made review quizzes!

They have quite a few game modes to choose from, and I love letting students vote for the style we play that day.

Incorporating a Blooket while reviewing boosts engagement while still helping students become familiar with your content!

Quizlet

Similar to Blooket, Quizlet is a great addition to your vocabulary portion of lesson plans. While the personalization and student progress options are only available with a paid subscription, you can create your own vocabulary sets for free!

Use Quizlet to create vocabulary decks based on academic vocab, your text vocabulary, and more. Students can also create their own sets, or you can search through pre-made sets and share those directly with students!

Again, you can only track student activity and progress with a paid version, but the free tools are so helpful!

Flocabulary

Flocabulary isn’t just for young kids–learning songs are designed for kids up to high school! The problem? Most of the Flocabularies require a paid subscription. Don’t be too discouraged, though!

I recommend signing up for a free version, accessing as much material as possible & seeing if the videos are posted on YouTube! I’ve done this many times, and it works.

Another HUGE benefit of Flocabulary is the grade-level vocabulary year-long units. Yes. Year. Long. Units.

If your district doesn’t have a vocabulary resource or curriculum guide (I haven’t heard many teachers say theirs does), then using those yearlong lists as guides to make sure your students are learning on-level vocabulary is such a help!

Example of the grade-level vocabulary packs.

Quill

Grammar-lovin’ friends, this one’s for you! It is amazing how much you can do with the free version of Quill.

This is one of the only websites I’ve ever used that allows you to track students’ progress in the free version–in a way that actually makes sense.

Quill is FANTASTIC for students who struggle with the basics of grammar and sentence writing. What I love about it most is that there are resources for all of my middle school students AND gives me ready-made differentiation.

I simply assign on-level tasks for students, then remediate for those that need it and find high school enrichment tasks for those who already get it!

ReadWriteThink

Looking for ready-made plans? The National Council of Teachers of English’s (NCTE) has a phenomenal resource for ELA teachers in ReadWriteThink.

If your district does not have a curriculum or even a pacing guide, here is a wonderful place to start. From novel studies to topical resources, there is so much to find on this website.

FishTank Learning

When I first discovered Fishtank, I thought I had hit the jackpot. I was teaching The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis and had zero resources. When I saw Fishtank’s full novel study and guide (complete with assessments, vocabulary, writing, and projects), I thought there had to be a catch.

Nope! I got the entire novel unit for FREE. I can’t stress just how much this helped me in my second year teaching.

Fishtank has resources from Kindergarten to 12th grade, and their website says they have over 200+ units and 4,000+ lesson plans. I have also seen yearlong pacing guides with lessons; there is so much to choose from.

Whether you need supplemental material, novel study ideas, or entire yearlong curricula, Fishtank’s free library is worth browsing in my opinion!

IXL

Yes, I know. IXL is crazy expensive. Do I think it’s worth it? Every penny.

Unfortunately, my district was only willing to spend that kind of money during the pandemic. They quickly moved funding elsewhere, and there was a huge gap left in my lesson planning.

But I still use IXL so often – for FREE! Here’s how:

The website gives you access to 6-10 free questions each day. When I’m teaching a skill or creating a resource like my daily/weekly grammar spirals, I go onto those skills, preview the questions and have instant amazing practice questions!

I then take those questions and use the format to change small details and make more of my own for students to practice.

My way might sound a little overkill, but the differentiation options I can see so quickly with IXL’s grade bands makes it worth it for me!

PBS LearningMedia

Recently, my district hosted professional learning with PBS Learning Media. I was blown away.

I LOVE the ability to incorporate cross-disciplinary instruction with PBS LearningMedia. Want to feature artists, plays, or science? It has you covered.

One impressive part of the website (at least for this local theatre participant) is how many dramas, in part or whole, are included in their library.

The website feels a little hard to navigate at points, but I would take the time to play around with the navigation. There are so many amazing things to discover.

Your District or School Media Specialist

My district has an amazing media specialist who is always purchasing new, helpful resources. The only problem with these resources is many teachers never realize we have them!

I would send a quick email to whomever purchases digital tools for your school or district and see what they have or can come up with!

Stuff You Missed in History Class Podcast

I know, we teach ELA, but English/Language arts and history are interconnected. The Stuff You Missed in History Podcast is top-notch.

Perfect for listening standards & multimodal comparisons, I love using podcasts, and this one’s my favorite!

While I always preview before I present, this podcast is almost entirely clean and appropriate for middle schoolers, and definitely high schoolers.

They teach history in such a unique and engaging way, in my opinion! I love creating a list of my favorite podcast episodes and linking them for my students so they can listen throughout the year! The podcast can be found anywhere you listen to podcasts (Spotify, Apple Podcast, etc.). My district has streaming sites blocked, but I find lots of episodes on their YouTube channel!

Crash Course History YouTube Channels by John Green

History as told by an award-winning author? Check!

For advanced middle school and high school students, John Green revisists history in such an engaging way. I love using these videos to build historical or background for the texts and periods we study.

The humor and amazing video effects and primary source features in these clips are cool. Students can pretend they’re not, but we teachers can recognize greatness when we see it.

Final Thoughts

I hope these resources can give you some peace of mind and a good jumping-off point for your lesson planning!

If you’re stuck at any point in the year, revisit this list (bookmark it now!) to find some extra inspiration.

My final tip is to just pick 2-3 new things (or even 1) that you’d like to incorporate and be super consistent with that.

If you’re looking for an investment:

In addition to the free resources I’ve linked for you, I wanted to take just a minute to point you toward my TPT store. I have tons of ELA resources created from what I know my students need. While not free resources, we make sure to price them reasonably!

A good starting point is our ELA Semester 1 Paired Passage Bundle for Reading Comprehension and Writing!

Shop all of our ELA Resources by clicking right here!