What do your students think about each other? Find out as you teach them the concepts of acrostic poems and challenge them to write an uplifting acrostic about a classmate.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students explore naming conventions in digital and non-digital settings then choose and explain specific names and profiles to represent themselves online.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students will really get into the swing of things as they analyze the text and film versions of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Pit and the Pendulum."
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Teachers and students come to school bringing a wide range of backgrounds, languages, abilities, and temperaments. Get things off to the best start by asking them to respect their differences and make the most of their similarities. By sharing information on their lives and dreams, students and teachers can build community in the classroom that will support literacy instruction throughout the school year.
Material Type: Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy
In this alternative to the traditional book report, students create book trailers using Microsoft Photo Story 3, a free downloadable software program for digital storytelling.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students practice writing detailed, sensory-rich descriptions by framing a small piece of nature and freewriting about it. From this minilesson, students can develop a variety of types of writing.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students write persuasive letters to their librarian requesting that specific texts be added to the school library. As they work, students plan their arguments and outline their reasons and examples.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students demonstrate comprehension by responding to open-ended questions based on the Newbery Honor book "Mr. Popper's Penguins", and then draw from the text and their personal experiences to create journals.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students explore the genre of commercial endorsements, establishing characteristics and requirements for the genre. Each student then composes an endorsement of a product, service, company, or industry.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Groups of students read and discuss American folklore stories, each group reading a different story. Using a jigsaw strategy, the groups compare character traits and main plot points of the stories. A diverse selection of American folk tales is used for this lesson, which is adaptable to any text set.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students create a soundtrack for a novel that they have read, as they engage in such traditional reading strategies as predicting, visualizing, and questioning.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students publish their work in an electronic portfolio, which enables them to respond to each other's content online.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Turn summer reading lists from a teacher-centered requirement to a student-driven exploration by asking students to create brochures and flyers that suggest books to explore during the summer months.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
In this lesson, students build classroom community by exploring environmental print and a teacher-created display that focuses on a favorite book. They then create and share their own presentations.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students tell their life stories in this lesson about autobiographies based on family photographs.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Explore the parts of book covers and dust jackets with this online guide, designed to to allow users to review the content that appears on each portion of these artifacts.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive
This tool allows students to create an online K-W-L chart. Saving capability makes it easy for them to start the chart before reading and then return to it to reflect on what they learned.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive
