List of MicroSims¶
Interactive Micro Simulations to help students explore English Language Arts concepts hands-on. Each sim is embedded directly in the chapter where it is introduced.
-
Academic Discussion Protocol Map
Compare the Socratic seminar, fishbowl, philosophical chairs, and numbered heads together by structure, facilitator role, evidence, goal, and duration, then prepare for your own role with ready-to-use sentence frames.
-
American Foundational Documents Timeline
Explore the chronological relationships among key foundational documents and writings that shaped American intellectual and civic life, from 1776 to 1964.
-
American Literary Periods Timeline
Identify and contextualize the major American literary periods by locating representative works on an interactive timeline spanning the colonial era to postmodernism.
-
Apply the Toulmin model to identify and label the components of a real argument — claim, evidence, warrant, backing, qualifier, counterclaim, and rebuttal — in three classic texts.
-
Apply systems thinking by constructing and interpreting causal loop diagrams for real-world phenomena, identifying reinforcing and balancing feedback loops.
-
Identify cognitive biases in realistic scenarios and develop strategies for recognizing them in everyday arguments and media.
-
Apply the structural conventions of argumentative essays by identifying and labeling the functional role of each paragraph — introduction, body, counterclaim, and conclusion.
-
Identify and distinguish nine major figures of speech — metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, verbal irony, situational irony, dramatic irony, symbolism, and allusion — with definitions, examples, and practice questions.
-
Five ELA Strands — Interactive Overview
Recall the five ELA strands and explore how reading, writing, speaking & listening, language, and research form an interconnected system.
-
Freytag's Pyramid — Plot Structure Explorer
Identify and apply the five stages of Freytag's Pyramid by locating the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution in classic literary works.
-
Apply understanding of Lexile levels to identify appropriately challenging texts for a given reader profile and explore representative works across the full Lexile spectrum.
-
Classify the four major literary categories — fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry — and their subgenres by exploring an interactive network diagram.
-
Identify seven common logical fallacies in realistic argument scenarios and practice distinguishing valid reasoning from flawed rhetoric.
-
Narrative Time — Scene, Summary, and Flashback
Distinguish between scene, summary, and flashback as narrative techniques by mapping how authors manipulate story time versus narrative space in classic works.
-
Compare and contrast epic poetry, sonnets, lyric poetry, and free verse by examining their defining traits, representative examples, and structural conventions.
-
Apply the research methodology framework by mapping a research project's phases — background research, focused inquiry, source evaluation, and synthesis — across primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.
-
Identify and label clause structure in simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences — and participial phrases — by clicking on color-coded grammatical chunks.
-
Evaluate multiple news and media sources by mapping them on a two-axis chart of ideological perspective versus credibility indicators, with category filters and evaluation questions.
-
Vocabulary Morphology Explorer
Apply morphological analysis by identifying word roots, prefixes, and suffixes to infer the meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary using three Latin roots: spec/spect, port, and dict/dic.