OVERVIEW
Students need to practice all types of writing, and oftentimes argumentative writing is ignored in favor of persuasive writing. In fact, students may not even understand there is a difference between these two types of writing. In this lesson, students examine the differences between argumentative writing and persuasive writing. After choosing topics that interest them, students conduct research which becomes the foundation for their argumentative essays.

Let the students be the vocabulary experts! Prior to whole class instruction, students create online flashcards and teach the class the new vocabulary.

Students move from modeled to independent comprehension of fiction stories by using texts by Jan Brett and interactive tools that demonstrate their comprehension.

Students get the big picture of the Middle East when they read and analyze Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel "Persepolis".

The old cliche, "A picture is worth a thousand words" is put to the test when students write their own narrative interpretations of events shown in an image.

For these lessons, students will be taken through a variety of activities to learn about plagiarism. They will learn what plagiarism is, the consequence for it, how to paraphrase writing, when to use direct quotes, and how to cite. This is a wonderful webquest for students to go through.

This resource provides an example of how standards-aligned instruction for reading comprehension can be taught across the continuum of the MTSS framework.

This resource provides an example of how standards-aligned instruction for vocabulary can be taught across the continuum of the MTSS framework.

In this unit, students explore how plastic pollution is choking the world’s oceans. Students learn about the history of plastic, how plastic ends up in the ocean, how plastic in the ocean impacts the ecosystem, and why it’s so hard to remove plastic from the ocean once it’s there. In the second half of the unit, students explore a variety of solutions for reducing plastic waste and reducing the amount of plastic that ends up in the ocean. Students will learn about large policy-based changes that can be made and also explore smaller voluntary actions they can take that will make a difference. Finally, students end the unit doing a research project aimed at educating others about the dangers of plastic and its impact on the environment.

In reading, this unit serves as the foundational informational unit of the year. Students will be challenged to explain the relationship between two or more scientific ideas, determine the meaning of domain-specific words, and understand the reasons and evidence the author uses to support a particular point. Since this is the first informational unit, routines and procedures for active annotation, discussion, and writing about reading should be introduced so that students are able to show understanding of the text and standards in multiple modes.

Cooperation and critical thinking are the name of the game as students use baseball facts they find online to create trivia questions for a class Jeopardy game.

In this twist on traditional bingo, the game boards feature students' names, and students answer questions designed to help them learn more about one another when their names are called.

Students play with and explore prepositions during a whole group reading of Ruth Heller's Behind the Mask, and then by composing and publishing prepositional poems based on the book's style.

Students learn that the plot structure described by Freytag's Pyramid is actually quite familiar as they diagram the plots of a familiar story, a television show, and a narrative poem.

After reading John Updike's "Ex-Basketball Player," students write poems describing themselves five years in the future. The teacher takes the poems and mails them to students in five years.

Currently, poetry is something we teach "if there is time" at the end of the year. I would love to make poetry a more integral part of the 1st grade curriculum. Poetry is currently taught by the students reading a preprinted packet of poetry and the students knowing that they are poems.  It's a very archaic way of teaching it, and I would love to change that.

The students are introduced to poetry throughout our curriculum (Scott Foresman Reading Street) through songs and curriculum poems, but are never specifically taught what makes a poem. This blended unit will change that! This unit will fall at the end of the 1st grade school year.

Created By: Katharine Valz

Students put their heads together in a poetry circle to learn and practice different forms of poetry.

This resource from CommonLit features American poet Tony Medina who celebrates Langston Hughes in his book Love to Langston. Medina uses poetry to tell the story of Langston Hughes' life and the importance of poetry as he imagines Hughes would have told it. To support student's understanding of the themes, teachers can access guiding questions, assessment questions and discussion prompts as well as texts with similar themes literary devices, topics and writing style.

Teach your students about sentence structure, rhyming words, sight words, vocabulary, and print concepts using a weekly poem.

Students' groans about studying poetry may disappear with this lesson in which students read poetry from various writers and use these poems to examine the sounds and sense of language.