Start the presses! Catchy titles, eye-popping graphics, and attractive fonts are all on students' agendas in this lesson as they create magazine covers to summarize a topic.
I've Got It Covered! Creating Magazine Covers to Summarize Texts
Get the GIST: A Summarizing Strategy for Any Content Area
GIST is a summarizing technique that can be used in any content area. Students will learn and apply the strategy while doing online research and writing activities on news stories.
Giving Voice to Child Laborers Through Monologues
Students present monologues in the "voice" of someone involved in child labor in England, respond to questions, and then discuss contemporary child laborers and compare them to the past.
Using Word Webs to Teach Synonyms for Commonly Used Words
Students use word webs to choose synonyms for generic adjectives and to learn to adjust their word usage for different contexts.
Scaling Back to Essentials: Scaffolding Summarization With Fishbone Mapping
Students work in pairs and groups as they complete fishbone maps that highlight main ideas and relevant details from a cause-effect text and then write summaries of content area texts.
ABC Bookmaking Builds Vocabulary in the Content Areas
V is for vocabulary. A content area unit provides the theme for a specialized ABC book, as students select, research, define, and illustrate a word for each alphabet letter.
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.
Persuasive Essay: Environmental Issues
How can we convince others to agree with us on important issues? In this lesson, students explore relevant environmental issues and gather information to write persuasive essays.
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."
Using the Four-Square Strategy to Define and Identify Poetic Terms
How do poets play with language? Students will explore some answers to this question as they search through poems for examples of alliteration, assonance, simile, and rhyme.
Flip-a-Chip: Examining Affixes and Roots to Build Vocabulary
Do your students detest having to define vocabulary words? Don"t confine them to worksheetsturn the study of affixes and roots into a hands-on contest to create context-rich vocabulary puzzles.
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.
Biography Project: Research and Class Presentation
Classroom biography study offers high-interest reading with a purpose, as students begin with inquiry and research, summarize and organize their information, and prepare oral presentations to share with the class.
Teaching Audience Through Interactive Writing
Through interactive writing, students work together and then independently to create invitation letters for a group of their peers and their families.
Catching the Bug for Reading Through Interactive Read-Alouds
Students learn about story structure, new vocabulary, and a variety of reading strategies by participating in an interactive read-aloud of Miss Bindergarten Stays Home From Kindergarten by Joseph Slate.
Guided Comprehension: Knowing How Words Work Using Semantic Feature Analysis
Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy of knowing how words work.
Let's Build a Snowman
In this lesson, students use both fiction and nonfiction texts, the Internet, and a K-W-L chart to learn about how animals survive the winter.
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.
Using QARs to Develop Comprehension and Reflective Reading Habits
Students are introduced to question-answer relationships (QARs). Using the QAR strategy, students identify different types of questions and learn how to determine the appropriate response for each question type.
Guided Comprehension: Summarizing Using the QuIP Strategy
Students learn to use the QuIP (questions into paragraphs) comprehension strategy to organize information and then synthesize it in writing.