A read-aloud of Patricia Polacco's "Thank You, Mr. Falker" helps promote deeper comprehension through questioning to achieve personal connections and discussions of character and theme.

Striking images can leave lasting impressions on viewers. In this lesson, students make text-self-world connections to a nature- or science-related topic as they collaboratively design a multimedia presentation.

Learn about Greek gods, heroes, and creatures through digital storytelling produced by students who have learned research techniques.

What's that sound? Students participate in a Directed Listening-Thinking Activity (DLTA) using "The Tell-Tale Heart," make predictions, and respond in the form of an acrostic poem or comic strip.

Students read sonnets, charting the poems' characteristics and using their observations to deduce traditional sonnet forms. They then write original sonnets, using a poem they have analyzed as a model.

Boom! Br-r-ring! Cluck! Moo!: Everywhere you turn, you find exciting sounds. Students use these sounds to write their own poems based on Dr. Seuss's "Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?"

Draft letters ask students to think critically about their writing on a specific assignment before submitting their work to a reader. This lesson explains and provides models for the strategy.

Introduce gerunds and review nouns, adjectives, and verbs through engaging read-alouds; then apply these concepts through collaborative word-sorting and poetry-writing activities.

Do their minds go blank when they confront a blank piece of paper? Speedwriting can help students get started on writing and come up with topics to write about. They can then incorporate their key ideas and phrases into a narrative with the help of a graphic story organizer.

Students examine three examples of revisionist fairy tales in which female characters act in empowered roles rather than behaving helpless and submissive.

In this science-based unit, students explore the world of energy. In the first half of the unit students learn what energy is, the different ways that energy is transferred from place to place, and the ways energy can be converted from one type to another. In the second half of the unit students explore the pros and cons of different types of renewable and nonrenewable energy. After learning about the different types of energy, students will grapple with what the world’s energy future will look like if more renewable solutions aren’t found, particularly in their communities. Through a combination of reading and research, it is our hope that students begin to build a deeper understanding of energy and its influence on our lives.

This unit builds on to the informational reading skills and strategies developed in previous units. At this point in the year we assume that students are able to actively read and annotate informational texts in order to build understanding of a topic. Therefore, the focus of this unit is on refining students’ ability to use different strategies to comprehend denser scientific texts. In particular, students will continue working on determining the main idea, summarizing key details, explaining cause and effect, using text features to improve understanding, and explaining how an author uses text features to elaborate on key concepts and ideas.

Students demonstrate their knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships by creating original comic strips and sharing their completed work in an oral presentation format.

The Essay Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for an informational, definitional, or descriptive essay.

Students analyze stylistic choices and grammar use in authentic writing, focusing on the use of the semicolon in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Students track the elements of mystery stories through Directed Learning-Thinking Activities, story maps, and puzzles. Then they offer clues for other readers as they plan and write original mystery stories.

A site where busy teachers can go to find current, relevant, meaningful and ready-to-go lessons, activities and resources that fit their classroom structure and meet national and state standards.

History has many faces in this lesson in which students read Jane Addams Award-winning books to learn about peace, social justice, world community, and equality.

Doctors, astrophysicists, and daycare providers are only some of the careers that will be explored in this lesson in which students research careers and publish occupational summaries about them.

Students explore the nature and structure of expository texts that focusing on cause and effect and apply what they learned using graphic organizers and writing paragraphs to outline cause-and-effect relationships.