This lesson teaches students how to use old verbs in a new way, thus creating new and fresh descriptive phrases.
Students read and discuss literature about intolerance and diversity. They work with a partner to write two-voice poems that illustrate situations of intolerance at their school and suggest a step toward acceptance.
This interactive invites students to create original multigenre, multimodal works--one drawing and three written texts--making the tool flexible for multiple writing activities.
Students climb into the mind of a spider in this lesson that asks them to compose a spider diary using spider facts, fiction, and "faction" fiction that sounds like fact.
Students use critical literacy skills to understand the concept of perspective and to then create a diary for an animal they research with a partner.
Creepy crawlers, hoppers, and fliers are the focus of this lesson in which students chorally read poems about insects and use the Internet to locate facts about their assigned insects.
Students won't miss a beat in this musical lesson that combines listening with personal response on a postcard.
Students will whistle while they work on this lesson, creating a photomontage movie of their interpretation of a favorite song's lyrics that will end everyone's day on a high note.
After analyzing "Family Pictures/Cuadros de Familia" by Carmen Lomas Garza, students create a class book with artwork and information about their ancestry, traditions, and recipes, followed by a potluck lunch.
Past and present come together when students interview their parents and create a skit that compares their parents' experiences as middle schoolers with the students own lives.
This assignment will go viral with students as they think about the meanings of words and images in public service announcements from YouTube before creating a PSA of their own.
The Mystery Cube helps students identify and summarize story elements in this popular genre. It can be used as a postreading or prewriting activity.
By exploring myths and truths surrounding Independence Day, students think critically about commonly believed stories regarding the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the Independence Day holiday.
By exploring myths and truths surrounding Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, students think critically about commonly believed stories regarding this famous speech from the Civil War era.
In this lesson, students practice a way to communicate without words by using a glyph. They create a name card using information about themselves. Students also interpret glyphs made by others.
Students demonstrate their letter/sound knowledge by working with name cards and sharing observations about their classmates names, giving teachers an opportunity to assess knowledge in a meaningful context.
Students name unnamed chapters in a novel they are reading. They discuss possible chapter names, considering accuracy, word choice, and connotation, before settling on a choice.
Students explore naming conventions in digital and non-digital settings then choose and explain specific names and profiles to represent themselves online.
Using Beloved as a model of a work with multiple narrative perspectives, students use a visualizing activity and close reading to consider ways in which subjective values shape contradictory representations.
This lesson challenges students' views of Native Americans as a vanished people by asking them to compare their prior knowledge with information they gather while reading about contemporary Native Americans.