What do your students think about each other? Find out as you teach them the concepts of acrostic poems and challenge them to write an uplifting acrostic about a classmate.
A combination of focused activities and creative, open-ended technology projects can help you take a new approach to building literacy with your secondary students. Use these articles, samples, and lessons to find new ideas and approaches that will work for your learners.
The Building Literacy in Secondary guide includes:
- Articles
- Reading, Literacy, and Digital Creativity
- SPLAT...POW...WOW! Motivating Readers and Writers
- More Than Just a Writing Prompt
- Supporting 6+1 Trait Writing
Lesson Plans
- Create a Video Poem
- Design a Book Cover
- Character Scrapbook
- Not Your Average Portfolio
- MyBook (Fakebook) Page
- Digital Book Trailers
These articles, lessons, and strategies engage students through creative technology to maximize student literacy skills.
Students improve phonemic awareness through games and chants that help them isolate beginning and ending sounds and connect them with their written symbols (graphemes)
Students learn components of think-alouds and type-of-text interactions through teacher modeling. In the process, students develop the ability to use think-alouds to aid in reading comprehension tasks.
Students research the effects of the Vietnam war on a specific group of people who were involved. They then create Internet scavenger hunts to share with the class.
Students choose unfamiliar words from their reading and create a multigenre, multimodal glossary of terms.
Students will learn to mind their ps and qs in this lesson on etiquette and appropriate behavior in the classroom.
In this author study, students listen to and discuss four books by Leo Lionni. They identify similarities and differences in the stories and then compare two stories of their choice.
This is a whole language lesson for Speech Language Pathologists that incorporates food vocabulary, basic concepts of matching, color, and number, as well as the pragmatic skill of turn taking for language-delayed kindergarten students.
This lesson is sure to sizzle, not fizzle, as students use comic strips to find onomatopoetic words, develop a vocabulary list from the words, and discuss why writers use onomatopoeia.
Comprehensive bibliographic full text reference and Canadian current events.
CBC Curio offers streaming video and audio resource. Students and teachers can find and explore CBC/Radio-Canada content that has been carefully selected for its educational value and is available in teaching-friendly formats.Content is available in both French and English.
Novel study activity including instructions, template, and evaluation guidelines for ELA 21.
The CD/DVD Cover Creator allows users to type and illustrate CD and DVD covers and related booklets for liner notes and other information. Students can use the tool to create covers for books, music, and films that they explored as well as to create covers for media they compose individually or as a class.
Child-Led, Hands-On, Active Learning for Kids including:
Math
Reading
Writing
Sports and Recreation
Colors
Multilingual Teaching Tips (lots of Chinese resources)
Our approach to civic education is about providing opportunities for students to experience their democracy first-hand rather than by reading about it in a textbook. By reaching students throughout their school career, during and between election periods, we hope to prepare them to be responsible and informed citizens.
CIVIX programming focuses on the themes of elections, government budgets, elected representatives and digital media literacy. Programs available include:
(1) Student Vote - an election enables teachers to bring democracy alive in the classroom
(2) Student Budget Consultation - combines civic education and financial literacy
(3) Rep Day - connects students with their elected representatives for a virtual or in-person meeting
(4) CTRL-F - a module providing quick strategies students can use to investigate and evaluate information
(5) PoliTalks - supports educators in bringing political discussions to the classroom - Materials are free with
registration, and programming is designed for grades 5-12
(6) Democracy Bootcamp - professional development conference for teachers designed to improve their
democratic engagement and delivery of CIVIX programming
CK-12 Physical Science for Middle School FlexBook® covers core physical science concepts and includes SIMs, PLIX, real world examples, and videos.
This is an extremely comprehensive unit on Physical Science (covering the Electricity outcomes for Grade 6). Some of the chapters are not aligned directly with grade 6 outcomes, but have the potential to be used for enrichment activities. In addition to what is listed above, this resource also includes online practice quizzes for students. Teachers can download printable versions of the quizzes, along with an answer key.
*You will have to sign up to ck12.org to access everything, but it is completely free!
CK-12 offers a flexible and engaging platform with interactive lessons, practice exercises, and multimedia content tailored to different learning styles. The Flexi feature allows students to customize their learning experience, focusing on areas where they need support or want to explore further. This adaptability helps students take control of their education and succeed at their own pace.
Be sure to check out FlexBooks as well!
This is a collection of ideas for classroom discussion to get EVERYONE involved!
Strategies include:
Quiz, quiz, Trade
Opinion Poll
Stepladder
Gogomo
World Cafe
Brainwriting
Thinking Hats
Tug of War
"With its reliable news in 10-minute video segments, CNN 10 allows teachers to keep students abreast of current events without overwhelming them with extra information or commentary. CNN 10 can be used as a starting point for a variety of activities. For instance, post a discussion question of the day related to a news topic and ask students to talk in small groups about how the story affects them. Ask students to choose a story of interest and probe into it for more depth. Flip the classroom by having students watch selected videos at home, and facilitate related projects in class. Promote collaboration and creativity by having students create their own news broadcasts related to curricular goals. Finally, promote media literacy by having students compare CNN's coverage with other media coverage of the same stories.
CNN 10 offers limited supports for classroom use: broadcast transcripts and downloadable weekly quiz questions, all targeted to the topics. But students can go to the top of the screen to get to more adult articles and topics, so beware. Still, that shouldn't deter kids who want to use the site independently or parents who want to help their kids learn what's going on in the world; the materials are user-friendly enough for everyone." (Common Sense Media)