Past and present come together when students interview their parents and create a skit that compares their parents' experiences as middle schoolers with the students own lives.

This assignment will go viral with students as they think about the meanings of words and images in public service announcements from YouTube before creating a PSA of their own.

The Mystery Cube helps students identify and summarize story elements in this popular genre. It can be used as a postreading or prewriting activity.

By exploring myths and truths surrounding Independence Day, students think critically about commonly believed stories regarding the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the Independence Day holiday.

By exploring myths and truths surrounding Abraham LincolnŐs Gettysburg Address, students think critically about commonly believed stories regarding this famous speech from the Civil War era.

In this lesson, students practice a way to communicate without words by using a glyph. They create a name card using information about themselves. Students also interpret glyphs made by others.

Students demonstrate their letter/sound knowledge by working with name cards and sharing observations about their classmatesŐ names, giving teachers an opportunity to assess knowledge in a meaningful context.

Students name unnamed chapters in a novel they are reading. They discuss possible chapter names, considering accuracy, word choice, and connotation, before settling on a choice.

Students explore naming conventions in digital and non-digital settings then choose and explain specific names and profiles to represent themselves online.

Using Beloved as a model of a work with multiple narrative perspectives, students use a visualizing activity and close reading to consider ways in which subjective values shape contradictory representations.

This lesson challenges students' views of Native Americans as a vanished people by asking them to compare their prior knowledge with information they gather while reading about contemporary Native Americans.

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 take a walk on the wild side when they research an animal and create a scavenger hunt activity for their classmates.

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.

It's important to "hook" readers at a story's beginning, but it's equally important to keep them interested. In this lesson, students learn to write effective conclusions to their own stories.

Students use fractured fairy tales to practice revision and editing as separate activities when they write their own versions of fairy tales.

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.