The traditional autobiography writing project is given a twist as students write alphabiographies - recording an event, person, object, or feeling associated with each letter of the alphabet.

Through a close reading of "Amelia Bedelia", students reread the material to discuss text-dependent questions, promoting deep thinking about the text and its characters.

Groups of students read and discuss American folklore stories, each group reading a different story. Using a jigsaw strategy, the groups compare character traits and main plot points of the stories. A diverse selection of American folk tales is used for this lesson, which is adaptable to any text set.

his lesson uses music and art in a vocabulary study of unfamiliar words from the song "America the Beautiful," increasing students' vocabulary while also increasing their knowledge of U.S. geography. A discussion to activate students' prior knowledge about sights and scenery throughout the United States is followed by a read-aloud and introduction to the song "America the Beautiful," which is then sung in each session of the lesson. Students learn the meanings of the song's words through shared reading and the use of context clues and images. Students then use photographs, illustrations, and descriptive language to create a mural shaped like the United States. Finally, through pictures and words, students reflect on what they have learned. This lesson is appropriate and adaptable for any patriotic event or holiday, and many of the vocabulary strategies are adaptable for other texts or word lists, as well.

Students read three short stories about women; discuss the development of female characters, gender differences, and society' s expectations; and write scripts in which the characters discuss their similarities and differences.

Students are often asked to perform speeches, but rarely do we require students to analyze speeches as carefully as we study works of literature. In this unit, students are required to identify the rhetorical strategies in a famous speech and the specific purpose for each chosen device. They will write an essay about its effectiveness and why it is still famous after all these years.

By analyzing Dear Abby's rant about bad grammar usage, students become aware that attitudes about race, social class, moral and ethical character, and "proper" language use are intertwined.

Students apply the analytical skills that they use when reading literature to an exploration of the underlying meaning and symbolism in Hieronymous Bosch's early Renaissance painting "Death and the Miser".

Students explore the ballads genre by reading medieval ballads to deduce their characteristics, acting out the ballads, comparing medieval and modern ballads using Venn diagrams, and composing their own ballads.

Students analyze images of Oscar Wilde used to publicize his 1882 American lecture tour. They then compare a caricature to another researched image, sharing this analysis in a podcast.

It is important for students to know how to evaluate messages conveyed by the news media. Exploration of the artistic techniques used in political cartoons leads to critical questioning.

Students explore and analyze the techniques that political (or editorial) cartoonists use and draw conclusions about why the cartoonists choose those techniques to communicate their messages.

Students review the basic conventions for using quotations from literature or references from a research project, focusing on accurate punctuation and page layout, then apply the conventions to their texts.

In this lesson, students learn to ask the right questions about the validity of surveys.

There's no question that students will be able to compose good survey questions by the end of this lesson.

Supporting inquiry-based research projects, the Animal Inquiry interactive invites elementary students to explore animal facts and habitats using writing prompts to guide and record their findings.

Students listen to fiction and nonfiction read-alouds and explore selected Websites to identify factual information about animals. This lesson focuses on ants, but can be adapted to any animal.

Following the traditional form of the haiku, students publish their own haikus using Animoto, an online web tool that creates slideshows that blend text and music.

Students analyze World War II posters, as a group and then independently, to explore how argument, persuasion and propaganda differ.