• Learn about different poetic terms
• Learn about a variety of different poem types
• Analyze a poem of your choosing using the TP-CASTT handout
• Learn how to write a variety of different types of poetry
• Write your own poem
Lila Gray instills her own love of poetry in her students by encouraging them to write original works and finding poems that express who they are. Her weekly open mic sessions create a perfect venue for building confidence and helping students find their voice while still hitting core standards and learning lifelong skills.
Teach your students about sentence structure, rhyming words, sight words, vocabulary, and print concepts using a weekly poem.
Students' groans about studying poetry may disappear with this lesson in which students read poetry from various writers and use these poems to examine the sounds and sense of language.
Exemplars of student poetry books with a couple sample poems.
Using an online template to help students write different kinds of Poems.
Working in small groups, students compose found and parallel poems based on a descriptive passage they have chosen from a piece of literature they are reading.
A hand out to help students write a response, journal entry, essay or critical piece. A PEED rubric for paragraph writing is attached.
Interview about how conservation officer works with Polar Bears. Before/During/After reading questions
Students deepen and refine their understanding of prepositions by reading Ruth Heller's Behind the Mask. They write preposition poetry and create a study guide using an online tool.
Poppa buys himself some new pants that need hemming. The women of his family are too tired to hem the pants before church the following morning. During the night, ghosts rally the women in the family each remove material from the pants so that the pants are ultimately too short for Papa.
This resource is a student's review from the ELA year. Students are able to discuss where they feel they have improved, areas they need more help in, most memorable assignments, etc.
Engage middle school students in a meaningful study of the lives of students from across the globe through the use of contemporary nonfiction and fiction. Students create personal autobiographies, sequence story events, and prepare well-crafted summaries while learning to use higher-level comprehension strategies such as Question-Answer Relationships and the Bio-Cube. Additionally, students conduct a critical study of the NCSS Notable Tradebook Nasreen̍s Secret School: A True Story From Afghanistan by Jeanette Winter, comparing and contrasting their own lives to Nasreen̍s and expanding their geographical knowledge of the Middle East.
This site features Louisa May Alcott and Samuel Clemens. See excerpts from Alcott's girlhood journal and Little Women. Read Clemens' explanation of his white suit in Mark Twain's Autobiography and the last chapter of Tom Sawyer, where Huck Finn has fled the Widow Douglas's civilizing influence. Help students see that their own lives and views can be a basis for creative writing.
This is a variety of ideas for ways students can share their learning.
The Postcard Creator helps students learn to identify all the typical parts of a postcard, and then generate their own postcard messages by typing information into letter templates. After printing their texts, students can illustrate the front of their postcards in a variety of ways, including drawing, collage, and stickers.
Where did the stars come from? What makes lightning and thunder? Pourquoi tales are narratives developed by various cultures around the world to explain natural phenomena. Students study three tales and learn about their cultures of origin, then work cooperatively to write and present an original pourquoi tale.
PowerPlay Young Entrepreneurs is a highly engaging program that is designed for classrooms ranging from grades 4 to 8. Students have fun exploring their passions, talents and interests as they plan and carry out their own business ventures. They make real products, earn real money and donate a portion of their profits to charity.For more information about the program, visit powerplayforsuccess.com.
Project Zero at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education has created a collection of Core Thinking Routines as part of their Visible Thinking Project. Teachers can view the entire collection on the Project Zero website (https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines#CoreThinkingRoutines), where each routine is described in detail (e.g., purpose, application, launch) in both English and Spanish.
These routines encourage students to be intentional thinkers.
What do they know or notice?
What is their perspective or position on an issue or idea?
How can they support their position or thinking?
What do they wonder? What are they confused about?
How has their thinking changed? What caused that change?
Students create their own monster trading cards using "powerful," vivid language to describe their creatures.