Like Junie B. Jones, students will be saying "Wait till you hear this" after listening to a Junie B. story and creating mystery boxes to help retell the story.

Students read biographies and explore websites of selected American authors and then role-play as the authors.

Students research mask-making from various cultures, highlight the masks' connections to cultural practices, compose poetry to reveal their understanding, analyze their own culture, and create personal masks and poetry.

Students read a work of realistic fiction about bullying and gain understanding through writing, Readers Theatre, and discussion.

What makes you happy? What makes you sad? Connecting words to feelings enriches vocabulary and helps with concept development.

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

Students engage in writing workshop, using a timeline to focus in on and write about a specific event.

Use an engaging, authentic text to build students' knowledge of phonic elements and give them a taste of Japanese culture.

Students sing a popular children's song, follow along with a picture book that contains the lyrics and illustrations, and then participate in activities to reinforce learning of the vocabulary words.

Students learn about sentences by listing verbs, nouns, and adjectives. They use word cards to create descriptive sentences and work in groups to create the longest sentences they can.

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.

Students read and analyze fairy tales from several cultures, identifying common elements. Choosing common situations, students write original fairy tales, using picture books as models and a peer review process.

Introduce students to the idea that movies and TV have their own language and grammar, which gives them special ways of telling their stories.

What if students could see the relevance of their school curriculum to real-world, interesting, STEM-related careers? Let's help them create a great future!

Using various reading strategies and resources, students explore the issue of food waste. They also create persuasive arguments and blog posts examining this topic.

Students watch a sample of artistic video clips online and respond through creative writing while using the vocabulary words they are currently studying.

This minilesson encourages children to seek out and appropriately react to nutrition labels and to make healthy food choices, integrating science, math, health, and literacy.

This lesson teaches students how to revise dull "telling" sentences into vivid, descriptive "showing" sentences.

Students compile a playlist of 10 songs representing a literary character and explain their choices based on the book's dialogue, plot, conflict, and resolution.