Students compare e-mails to traditional letters, identifying style and intended audience for each. They then write both an e-mail and a letter about the same topic.
What's the Difference? Beginning Writers Compare E-mail with Letter Writing
Audience, Purpose, and Language Use in Electronic Messages
Students explore using electronic messaging and Internet abbreviations for specific purposes and examine the importance of using a more formal style of writing based on their audience.
Dr. Seuss's Sound Words: Playing with Phonics and Spelling
Boom! Br-r-ring! Cluck! Moo!Everywhere you turn, you find exciting sounds. Students use these sounds to write their own poems based on Dr. Seuss's Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?
Persuasive Writing: What Can Writing in Family Message Journals Do for Students?
This lesson engages children in using writing to their families as a persuasive tool to get what they want and need.
Family Message Journals Teach Many Purposes for Writing
This lesson encourages children to explore authentic reasons for writing by writing messages to their family in a family message journal.
Launching Family Message Journals
This lesson introduces Family Message Journalsa teacher-tested tool for encouraging family involvement and supporting writing to reflect and to learn.
Shared Spelling Strategies
Students increase their spelling accuracy and retention, while preserving fluency, by using sound, sight recall, and analyzing strategies instead of memorizing words, as they deal with spelling during drafting.
Crossword Puzzles
This tool allows students to complete crossword puzzles on a variety of grade-appropriate topics, and also create and print their own crossword puzzles.
Word Family Sort
This online activity helps students recognize word patterns by having them sort a series of words into short-vowel word families.
Persuading the Principal: Writing Persuasive Letters About School Issues
Students learn that you don't have to raise your voice to raise a point. Writing a persuasive letter to your principal is a great way to get your opinions heard.
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.
Spelling Cheerleading: Integrating Movement and Spelling Generalizations
"2-4-6-8, students will be spelling great" in this lesson that teaches the y rule for adding suffixes through cheering the spelling of words aloud, word sorts, and writing stories.
Word Sorts for Beginning and Struggling Readers
Students are introduced to short-vowel word families and learn to sort words alone and with a partner using the Word Family Sort activity.
Going on a Shape Hunt: Integrating Math and Literacy
Students participate in a scavenger hunt for shapes; reading, writing, and discussion of shapes encourage literacy and math skills.
You Can't Spell the Word Prefix Without a Prefix
Students explore the role of prefixes, as well as their origins and meanings, and examine how the understanding of prefixes can improve comprehension, decoding, and spelling.
Name Talk: Exploring Letter-Sound Knowledge in the Primary Classroom
Students demonstrate their letter/sound knowledge by working with name cards and sharing observations about their classmates' names, giving teachers an opportunity to assess knowledge in a meaningful context.
Shared Poetry Reading: Teaching Print Concepts, Rhyme, and Vocabulary
The rhyme and reason behind this lesson is that students will need to develop important reading skills to increase their reading fluency.
Learning About Word Families with Click, Clack, Moo
Using text from Doreen Cronin's Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type as shared readings, first-grade students learn word families and how to decode new words in a word family.
Word Study with Henry and Mudge
Henry and Mudge is used in this lesson to build students' word recognition through rereading, high-frequency word banks, word studies, and writing.
Solving Word Meanings: Engaging Strategies for Vocabulary Development
Vocabulary gumshoes use context clues and semantics to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.