Students learn how to walk a mile in someone else's shoes by reading historical fiction about the Underground Railroad.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Students read "The Jolly Postman", in which a postman delivers letters to storybook characters. They explore different types of mail and categorize letters from the book and their own mail. Children find favorite words, phrases, and sentences from familiar stories. Working together, they combine their words and phrases to create a poem. The poem is then shared as performance poetry.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Special edition! Students use ReadWriteThink tools to create magazines about prominent figures using a variety of writing genres and styles.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Pat Mora's poem "Echoes" demonstrates that our senses are powerful tools for literary analysis and comprehension as students use their senses to discover new ways to read and write.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
After reading and analyzing short examples of travel writing and discussing conventions of the genre, students write their own travel articles.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
In this lesson, students learn to ask the right questions about the validity of surveys.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
In this unit, students become active archivists, gathering photos, artifacts, and stories for a museum exhibit that highlights one decade in their school's history.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
Students will love unwrapping this lesson about before, during, and after reading activities based on Margaree King Mitchell's book, "Grandaddy's Gift".
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
The game Bingo is transformed in this lesson in which students use symbols and images to make connections to environmental print through the use of personalized Bingo cards.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students make purposeful choices for their reading materials, thinking about their reasons for reading a book and using strategies to match books to their abilities.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students write original stories using alphabetical order, beginning each page with a new letter, and then illustrate their texts in class or at home with their families.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students create epitaphs for characters from a tragedy, such as "Hamlet".
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Dr. Seuss's "The Cat in the Hat" is used as a primer to teach students how to analyze a literary work using plot, theme, characterization, and psychoanalytical criticism.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
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.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
As a culminating activity for "Slaughterhouse-Five", students make a compilation album (a CD with 6-8 tracks) that reflects their analysis, understanding, and reaction to the ideas in the novel "Slaughterhouse-Five".
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
V is for vocabulary. A content area unit provides the theme for a specialized ABC book, as students select, research, define, and illustrate a word for each alphabet letter.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students become novice lexicographers as they explore recent new entries to the dictionary, learn the process of writing entries for the Oxford English Dictionary, and write a new entry themselves.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Using a collaborative story written by students, the teacher leads a shared-revising activity to help students consider content when revising, with students participating in the marking of text revisions.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students utilize their reading and writing skills as they think critically in order to sort books in multiple ways.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
