Students learn content area vocabulary and increase reading comprehension using the Vocabulary, Language, Prediction (VLP) approach.

Students read Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis, demonstrate comprehension of the story by involving themselves in discussions, and analyze the characters in preparation for a class "press conference."

Writing professional reviews teaches students to understand audience, content, and publication guidelines. In this lesson, students put these into practice as professional writers critiquing, designing, and publishing reviews on Amazon.com.

Students use the Profile Publisher to draft online social networking profiles, yearbook profiles, and newspaper or magazine profiles for themselves, other real or fictional characters.

Students create a checklist outlining what effective writers do, revise his or her own writing, and engage in a written conversation to help peers with the revision process.

After exploring several question and answer books on a variety of topics, students research a topic and create their own class question and answer book.

In this lesson, athletics, aesthetics, and poetics intersect in new ways as developing literacy learners experiment together with the forms of language.

The Story Map interactive is designed to assist students in prewriting and postreading activities by focusing on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution.

Useful for a wide variety of reading and writing activities, this outlining tool allows students to organize up to five levels of information.

The Webbing Tool provides a free-form graphic organizer for activities that ask students to pursue hypertextual thinking and writing.

This reading lesson is for first graders. First graders will read the decodable text Dan and Nan.  Image: AMERICANED_UCLACOMM_034

Students will have a whale of a good time in this lesson in which they use fiction and nonfiction texts to write a letter to an online scientist.

After examining recipes written based on students' favorite fairy tales, students research a recipe related to their favorite story, book, or fairy tale and include it in a classroom recipe book.

This unit challenges students to view history with a critical lens, and to notice how there is always more than one side to a story. The unit begins with the Mayflower and helps students develop an understanding of why so many colonists decided to leave England and travel to the New World. Students will explore the hardships faced by the colonists, both on the ship and once they arrive in the New World, and how the colonists persevered and relied on the geography and environment to meet their needs. Students will then learn about the Wampanoag, the people who were on the land before the Pilgrims arrived. They will learn about what the Wampanoag valued, how they viewed the Pilgrims, and how the arrival of explorers and settlers negatively influenced their tribe. Then students will be pushed to analyze what really happened at the first Thanksgiving, and whose story is being told. Students will realize that the traditional story of the first Thanksgiving contains many myths that don't accurately reflect the Wampanoag and what really happened in 1621.

High school students are taught how to use resumes and cover letters to highlight their skills and make them stand out, whether applying to college or for a job.

The Riddle Interactive outlines the characteristics of riddle poems and provides direct instruction on the prewriting and drafting process for writing original riddle poems.

This unit is focused on three classic fairy tales: The Three Little Pigs, The Three Bears, and Little Red Riding Hood. With each fairy tale, students are first exposed to the classic version, familiarizing themselves with the basic plot and lessons. Then students explore the ways authors change setting, characters, and plot while still maintaining the overall essence of the classic story. Some of the changes the authors make reflect the nuances of different cultures and environments, while others are made for entertainment and humor. Either way, students will explore the idea that different authors can use their own perspective and culture to shape the stories they write or retell. By reading multiple versions of the same classic fairy tale, students will also be able to grapple with the bigger lessons of each tale—the importance of not talking to strangers, how hard work and patience pay off, and the importance of respecting others’ property and privacy. Over the course of the unit, students will be challenged to think about how each of these unique themes is portrayed and how in each different version of the fairy tale the characters may learn the lesson in slightly different ways. It is our hope that this unit, in connection with others in the sequence, will help students see the power of storytelling and how simple stories can be changed and improved based on an author’s ideas and preferences.

In reading, this unit builds directly onto the reading strategies from unit 2. Students will continue to be pushed to be inquisitive consumers of text, asking and answering questions about characters, setting, and plot as they listen to and engage with a text. Students will also continue to work on retelling stories and including key details. Similar to units 1 and 2, students will continue to think deeply about characters and setting and how the details an author includes in the illustration and text help a reader better understand both. Because most of the focuses for this unit are a repeat of similar focuses from units 1 and 2, students should be pushed to a much higher level of rigor and understanding than in previous units. One new focus of this unit, however, is on comparing and contrasting the adventures and experiences of characters in stories. Students will be asked at multiple points to use information they have learned about key events, characters, and setting to compare and contrast different versions of the classic fairy tale. Students should be pushed beyond just superficial comparisons across the different stories. At the end of the unit, students will also have a chance to retell and act out the different fairy tales, putting their own “artistic” spin on the fairy tale.

In writing, students will continue to write daily in response to the text. In unit 2, students began to write answers that correctly answered the questions using facts. In this unit, students will be pushed to continue to focus on correct answers that may show some level of inferential or critical thinking. Students will also begin to learn how to include details from the text in their answers. At this point in the year, it is not important that students have the best evidence but rather that they are including some details that support the answer to the question in one way or another. Structure and grammar feedback during this unit should be based on assessment data from units 1 and 2.

In this lesson, students use a scaffold to help them compile information to write a solid research paper.

Each small group of students researches one aspect of the same big topic, such as the Gold Rush, and teaches what they have learned to the rest of the class.

In this activity, students read short stories and create presentations in multiple media to share in a Short Story Fair. At the fair, students explore and respond to the displays.