Students whose first language is not English reflect on nature through readings, a visit to a green area, and bookmaking using the writing process and peer feedback.
Students will develop their summarizing skills while learning about local history. They will learn to consider audience while selecting topics, conducting research and interviews, and writing historical markers for their town.
This twist on readers theater has students prepare original news programs based on incidents in a recent reading, as they explore standard literary elements of character, conflict, resolution, and setting.
Students create a soundtrack for a novel that they have read, as they engage in such traditional reading strategies as predicting, visualizing, and questioning.
Students read and analyze fairy tales, identifying their common elements. They then write their own ŇfracturedÓ fairy tales by changing one of the literary elements found in the original.
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.
Students create alphabet books, which are used as an integrated assessment with science, health, social studies, and any other content area. This lesson plans looks at the theme of community.
This activity, inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper and the stories of Raymond Carver, challenges students to get inside contemporary life and characters through the creation of monologues.
Make connections across genres and across cultures to engage students in the study of literary voice and themes. Comprehension skills and vocabulary also come into play, especially for English language learners, as students read a novel and related poems, then write and perform original poems related to the novel.
Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).
Students read and analyze technology reviews to establish the characteristics of the genre. They then compose their own reviews on a technology of their choice.
Students apply think-aloud strategies to reading and to composition of artwork and poetry. They research symbols of peace as they prewrite, compose, and publish their poetry.
The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.
Students learn about phonics by focusing on the letter m and participating in an integrated array of activities, including reading, writing, mathematics, music, art, and technology.
Picture Match is a matching game that reinforces the concept of beginning-letter and short- and long-vowel sounds. .
Students move from modeled to independent comprehension of fiction stories by using texts by Jan Brett and interactive tools that demonstrate their comprehension.
Students use trading cards to examine fictional characters in a story.
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.
In this twist on traditional bingo, the game boards feature students' names, and students answer questions designed to help them learn more about one another when their names are called.
Students play with and explore prepositions during a whole group reading of Ruth HellerŐs Behind the Mask, and then by composing and publishing prepositional poems based on the bookŐs style.