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 create their own monster trading cards using "powerful," vivid language to describe their creatures.

Students take a walk on the wild side when they develop an understanding of nonfiction texts with hands-on experiences and intense analysis.

Working as career counselors for a literary character, students find a job for the character, prepare a resume, and design questions and answers to prepare them for a job interview.

Students read a variety of picture books that contain elements of the heroŐs journey and use an online interactive tool to analyze the stories.

Students learn content area vocabulary and increase reading comprehension using the Vocabulary, Language, Prediction (VLP) approach.

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.

Writing professional reviews teaches students to understand audience, content, and publication guidelines. In this lesson, students put these into practice as professional writers critiquing, designing, and publishing reviews on Amazon.com.

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.

Students create a checklist outlining what effective writers do, revise his or her own writing, and engage in a written conversation to help peers with the revision process.

Students analyze propaganda techniques used in pieces of literature and political advertisements. They then look for propaganda in other media, such as print ads and commercials.

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.

In this lesson, athletics, aesthetics, and poetics intersect in new ways as developing literacy learners experiment together with the forms of language.

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.

Students will have a whale of a good time in this lesson in which they use fiction and nonfiction texts to write a letter to an online scientist.