The Plot Diagram is an organizational tool focusing on a pyramid or triangular shape, which is used to map the events in a story. This mapping of plot structure allows readers and writers to visualize the key features of stories.
Students learn that the plot structure described by Freytag's Pyramid is actually quite familiar as they diagram the plots of a familiar story, a television show, and a narrative poem.
Students really get into character in this lesson as they act out the parts of a script and analyze character motivations and dialogue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Students take a walk on the wild side when they develop an understanding of nonfiction texts with hands-on experiences and intense analysis.
Students read Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis, demonstrate comprehension of the story by involving themselves in discussions, and analyze the characters in preparation for a class "press conference."
The interactive Printing Press is designed to assist students in creating newspapers, brochures, and flyers.
Students use the Profile Publisher to draft online social networking profiles, yearbook profiles, and newspaper or magazine profiles for themselves, other real or fictional characters.
Puzzle Me Words is a fun, educational game for primary students that reinforces letter sounds and how sounds combine to form words.
After exploring several question and answer books on a variety of topics, students research a topic and create their own class question and answer book.
Water is always moving in a continuous cycle from liquid to solid to gas and back again. Students study this never-ending cycle through shared readings, center activities, and experiments.
ReadWriteThink is an online resource that contains lessons, interactive activities, printables, and an app to help kids improve their reading and writing skills. ... Each heading contains hundreds of unit plans, lesson plans, and activities, each divided by subject, learning objective, and grade level.
You can filter lessons and activities by grade using the box on the left side of the site.
Select the grade you want, and select Lesson or Student Interactive under Resource Type to find activities for learning.
Professional learning, podcasts, etc are also available.
Please note - if you click "Discover" the "Providers" in the Resource Bank and find Read, Write, Think - you will find over 500 of their lessons directly in the bank.
Useful for a wide variety of reading and writing activities, this outlining tool allows students to organize up to five levels of information.
The Webbing Tool provides a free-form graphic organizer for activities that ask students to pursue hypertextual thinking and writing.