This activity helps students understand that science writing is organized in identifiable patterns called text structures. Understanding and using these different text structures help refine students abilities to both read and write in science.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Students participate in learning clubs, select content area topics, and draw on texts - including websites, printed material, video, and music - to investigate their topics, and share their learning using similar media.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
Students can generate descriptive timelines and even include images in the description.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive
In Module 9.3, students engage in an inquiry-based, iterative process for research. Building on work with evidence-based analysis in Modules 9.1 and 9.2, students explore topics of interest, gather research, and generate an evidence-based perspective to ultimately write an informative/explanatory research paper that synthesizes and articulates their findings. Students use textual analysis to surface potential topics for research, and develop and strengthen their writing by revising and editing.
Material Type: Module
This textbook follows California Language Arts Standards for grades 9-12 to provide a generalized understanding of composition and to serve as a supplementary aid to high school English teachers.
Material Type: Textbook
Go Away, Big Green Monster! Ed Emberley's tale about a scary, multicolored monster is used to help students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills. In this lesson, students chorally read the story and then point out familiar color words or sight words that appear in the story. After finishing the story, students are introduced to four different literacy center activities that include participating in a read along, building word families with story words, playing a memory game with color words from the story, and retelling story events using sentence strips. In the sessions that follow, students create their own artwork of the big green monster and use that artwork to help them write a story. Students use both self- and peer-editing to improve their writing. Completed stories are either published on the Internet or in a class book.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
This online tool enables students to learn about and write acrostic poems. Elements of the writing process are also included.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Stories and poems that have a familiar structure can create a supportive context for learning about the writing process, building students' background knowledge, and scaffolding their creation of original stories. In this lesson for students in second or late first grade, teachers help students explore the concepts of beginning, middle, and ending by reading a variety of stories and charting the events on storyboards. As they retell the stories, students are encouraged to make use of sequencing words (first, so, then, next, after that, finally). A read-aloud of Once Upon a Golden Apple by Jean Little and Maggie De Vries introduces a discussion of the choices made by an author in constructing a plot. Starting with prewriting questions and a storyboard, students construct original stories, progressing from shared writing to guided writing; independent writing is also encouraged.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students use art and poetry to explore and understand major characteristics of the Romantic period.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
In this module, students will read, write, and speak about the topic of voting rights and responsibilities. In the first two units, students will read informational texts that focus on the women’s suffrage movement and the leadership of New Yorker Susan B. Anthony. Specifically, they will read firsthand and secondhand accounts of her arrest and trial for voting in a time when women were outlawed from doing so. Students then read The Hope Chest by Karen Schwabach, a historical fiction novel set in the weeks leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment. They will continue to examine the idea of leaders of change and explore the theme “making a difference” by collecting evidence on how selected characters make a difference for others. After completing the novel, students will analyze this theme in selected passages of the novel and write an essay
Material Type: Module
Journal Buddies is YOUR Go-To Source for Writing Prompts Journal Buddies Jill, Creator & Curator of JournalBuddies.com, states the following: "I love sharing fabulous and inspiring journaling ideas, creative writing prompts, and fun topics (with teachers, homeschoolers, young writers, parents, kids, students, and writers of all ages). Because of my love for prompts 💜and for sharing… I am proud to say that Journal Buddies is one of the best free writing prompt list resources on the Internet.Because of this burning passion of mine for prompt lists and for sharing I am able to offer you loads and loads of absolutely FREE prompts and ideas. Best of all… They are all easily accessible right here and available at your fingertips. So, if you also have a passion for prompts — or just a need for them — I guarantee you’ll find prompts here on my blog that you will love! While my prompts are all free for you to use (in non-commercial/non-money making endeavors), I ask that you give my site credit. Please do so when you use my prompts in your classroom or homeschooling or if you share them online or elsewhere. Thank you so much. I appreciate it! "
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Homework/Assignment
Real-world writing allows students and teachers to connect the dots between writing in the classroom by classifying writing into six areas: Express and Reflect; Inform and Explain; Evaluate and Judge; Inquire and Explore; Analyze and Interpret; Take a Stand/Propose a Solution.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
This activity emphasizes the importance of teaching reading and writing strategies for students to use with informational text.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Students whose first language is not English reflect on nature through readings, a visit to a green area, and bookmaking using the writing process and peer feedback.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
The Book Cover Creator is designed to allow users to type and illustrate front book covers, front and back covers, and full dust jackets. Students can use the tool to create new covers for books that they read as well as to create covers for books they write individually or as a class.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive
This lesson will involve work in oral language, concepts of print, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing with the use of one book, The Black Snowman.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Making Evidence-Based Claims ELA/Literacy Units empower students with a critical reading and writing skill at the heart of the Common Core: making evidence-based claims about complex texts. These units are part of the Developing Core Proficiencies Program. This unit develops students' abilities to make evidence-based claims through activities based on a close reading of the Commencement Address Steve Jobs delivered at Stanford University on June, 2005.
Material Type: Primary Source, Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy, Unit of Study
