Students track the elements of mystery stories through Directed Learning-Thinking Activities, story maps, and puzzles. Then they offer clues for other readers as they plan and write original mystery stories.
Students explore picture books to identify the characteristics of four types of conflict. They then write about a conflict they have experienced and compare it to a conflict from literature.
Using excerpts from the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, comics, and songs from different musical genres, students examine the characteristics of transcendentalism.
Pairs of students respond to literature alternately in shared journals. Mini-lessons are presented on responding to prompts, creating dialogue, adding drawings, and asking and answering questions.
Students use art and poetry to explore and understand major characteristics of the Romantic period.
Students explore the concepts of audience and purpose by focusing on an issue that divided Americans in 1925, the debate of evolution versus creationism raised by the Scopes Monkey Trial.
History has many faces in this lesson in which students read Jane Addams Award-winning books to learn about peace, social justice, world community, and equality.
Doctors, astrophysicists, and daycare providers are only some of the careers that will be explored in this lesson in which students research careers and publish occupational summaries about them.
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.
Students read an example of allegory, review literary concepts, complete literary elements maps and plot diagrams, create a pictorial allegory, and write diamante poems related to the theme of change.
Students add up the effect of images and persuasive language to analyze the art and words in advertisements.
Students make sense of dollars and cents when they study the importance of saving and budgeting in this lesson.
Interaction and adventure draws high school and elementary school students together as they analyze stories about the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Students make predictions about "Bridge to Terabithia" and its characters, complete character studies, and relate the characters' experiences to their own as they identify ways to make and keep friends.
After reading "All Quiet on the Western Front", students discuss the novel's ironic ending, then compose alternate titles and endings for the book, and design new book covers.
Writing gets personal when students interview family members in order to write a personal narrative about that person.
Students create a Detective's Handbook based on a detective mystery they have read. The handbooks include expository and descriptive writing, as well as a letter.
The activity includes a series of exercises, in which students view the literal representations of idioms and then examine the metaphorical meanings of the idioms.
Fact Fragment Frenzy provides elementary students with an online model for finding facts in nonfiction text, then invites students to find facts in five sample passages.
Picture books provide the basis for an analysis of fairy tale elements before students write their own original tales.