Students will have a blast as they use descriptive language to write about an "explosive" and dramatic moment in their lives.
Make a Splash! Using Dramatic Experience to "Explode the Moment"
Solving the Math Curse: Reading and Writing Math Word Problems
Students' reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills add up as they decipher word problems and use what they've learned to solve a crossword puzzle.
Exploring Cost and Savings Using Children's Literature
Students make sense of dollars and cents when they study the importance of saving and budgeting in this lesson.
Descriptive Video: Using Media Technology to Enhance Writing
Students will have a roaring good time when they watch a scene from The Lion King as a way to compare standard and described programming media.
Spelling in Parts: Learning to Spell, Write, and Read Polysyllabic Words
How do you spell polysyllabic? While this word may be a bit too advanced for students, they will definitely be spelling polysyllabic words using a strategy called Spelling in Parts.
The Solution Square: Strategies for Conflict Resolution
Students will square up a conflict and learn how to effectively resolve any issues using a Solution Square.
Write-Talks: Students Discovering Real Writers, Real Audiences, Real Purposes
There's a world of writers out there, and in this lesson students discover them as they listen to presentations from local writers and learn about what, why, and how they write in their day-to-day lives.
A Musical Prompt: Postcards From the Concert
Students won't miss a beat in this musical lesson that combines listening with personal response on a postcard.
Developing Inferential Comprehension Through DL-TA and Discussion Webs
Students will love unwrapping this lesson about before, during, and after reading activities based on Margaree King Mitchell's book, Grandaddy's Gift.
To, Too, or Two: Developing an Understanding of Homophones
The classroom becomes a stage in this interactive lesson in which students sing, act, and design comic strips to learn the meanings and spellings of common homophones.
Sort, Hunt, Write: A Weekly Spelling Program
It's easy to make spelling fun. Using a variety of activities from sorting to using words in context will help deepen students' understanding of word patterns.
Using Songwriting to Build Awareness of Beginning Letter Sounds
"Bessie bird lives in a barn" in this lesson in which students create alliterative animal songs to help them learn letter names and consonant sounds and build phonemic awareness.
Charting Characters for a More Complete Understanding of the Story
Character Perspective Charting allows students to compare multiple characters and their points of view to better understand a story.
A-Hunting We Will Go: Teaching Rhyming Through Musical Verse
Adapting the song "A-Hunting We Will Go," students put a whale in a pail and even "take a little bear and hug it if we dare."
Blending Fiction and Nonfiction to Improve Comprehension and Writing Skills
Students use a text set to increase understanding of content area material and demonstrate what they have learned by writing an original piece that blends together narrative and expository elements.
Behind the Scenes With Cinderella
Cinderella without castles, coaches, or ball gowns? Students use versions of Cinderella to explore how the setting of a storytime, place, and cultureaffects the characters and plot.
Figurative Language: Teaching Idioms
It's raining cats and dogs! Students explore figurative language through read-alouds, teacher modeling, and student-centered activities, further developing their understanding of the literal versus the metaphorical translations of idioms.
The Big Green Monster Teaches Phonics in Reading and Writing
A big green monster helps students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills through choral reading, literacy center activities, and writing stories.
Creating a Classroom Newspaper
Students write authentic newspaper stories, including learning about various aspects of newspapers, such as writing an article, online articles, newspaper reading habits, and layout and design techniques.
Wartime Poetry: Working With Similes
Students analyze a photograph, brainstorm words to describe the characters' senses and feelings, work in pairs to describe a character's experience, and create a poem using their ideas and similes.