"That's my position and I'm sticking to it!" After reading about the Korean War, students will take a position in response to an open-ended question, support their position, and evaluate that support.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students develop their reading, writing, research, and technology skills using graphic novels. As a final activity, students create their own graphic novels using comic software.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Students compose a multigenre paper, modeled after the Delany sister's autobiography, "Having Our Say", that includes the autobiographical narrative essay as well as an informational nonfiction piece.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
This lesson will be turning heads and pages as students learn how to choose appropriate books for independent reading exercises and later evaluate their choices.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students analyze personal homepages, as well as a character in a book they have read, and then create a homepage for the character.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Students gather factual information about frogs and toads to create nonfiction and fiction stories. Drawing is used for prewriting.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
This lesson engages children in using writing to their families as a persuasive tool to get what they want and need.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students must "become" a character in a novel in order to describe themselves and other characters using powerful adjectives.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Folk tales and fairy tales are of interest to and part of the language arts curriculum for young learners. This lesson supports the study of this genre and the study of irregular patterns and letter-sound relationships related to decoding and spelling. After reading the folk tale Jack and the Beanstalk, students discuss the word giant and its beginning sound. Students then create their own lists of words that begin with the same sound. Then, students are introduced to words with the soft g sound and create a new list of words with this beginning sound. As a culminating activity, students work individually or in groups to categorize animal names into groups according to their beginning g sound.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students learn how to get their voice out on the web when they research issues important to them and compose a persuasive podcast to post online.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students view examples of blogs, learn the basic elements of blog creation, and then create a blog from the perspective of a fictional character.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students increase their understanding of alphabet books by participating in a variety of reading and writing activities.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
Nonfiction may be dull for some students, but this lesson helps them focus on the main ideas. Through awareness of section headings, students learn to sort and categorize main concepts.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students rework their forgotten/abandoned drafts by cutting and covering up selected words. By creatively manipulating text, they explore portal writing, a strategy for envisioning a new story or story direction.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students learn content area vocabulary and increase reading comprehension using the Vocabulary, Language, Prediction (VLP) approach.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students identify similes in poetry and gain experience in using similes as a poetic device in their own work.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Through a series of picture book read-alouds, students engage in critical discussion of complex issues of race, class, and gender.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
This lesson makes a connection to popular culture by asking students to research and analyze contemporary and historic protest songs and to catalogue them in a class wiki.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
