What do cowboy hats have to do with fairy tales? Two traditional fairy tales and their Texas-based counterparts set the stage for five different ways to respond to text.

Teach your students about sentence structure, rhyming words, sight words, vocabulary, and print concepts using a weekly poem.

The Word Wizard activities in this lesson transform phonics from drudgery into delight! Students manipulate letters to make different words.

Students apply and build their knowledge of letters and letter sounds as they play games and interact with letters online, creating their own ABC book as a final activity.

After reading an engaging yet predictable text about a child looking for his cat, students use a similar format and high-frequency words to craft tales about their own lost pets.

Traditional chants and songs are adapted to help young students recognize and generate rhymes. The word and letter patterns involved in rhymes provide a stepping stone to reading skills.

Students improve phonemic awareness through games and chants that help them isolate beginning and ending sounds and connect them with their written symbols (graphemes).

"Run, run, as fast as you can." Students use this refrain from The Gingerbread Man to learn letter-sound correspondence. Students use their new skills to write an online story.

Students gather factual information about frogs and toads to create nonfiction and fiction stories. Drawing is used for prewriting.

Students will need their language-building hard hats as they construct words using onset and rime, building vocabulary and phonics comprehension.

Students read three short stories about women; discuss the development of female characters, gender differences, and society's expectations; and write scripts in which the characters discuss their similarities and differences.

Students discover that they can make a world of difference when they participate in the online Earth Day bag program.

Make connections across genres and across cultures to engage students in the study of literary voice and themes. Comprehension skills and vocabulary also come into play, especially for English language learners, as students read a novel and related poems, then write and perform original poems related to the novel.

Students increase their understanding of alphabet books by participating in a variety of reading and writing activities.

Students evaluate book reviews written by other children, discussing their components and effectiveness, and write reviews of favorite books to record on video or post online.

Students will whistle while they work on this lesson, creating a photomontage movie of their interpretation of a favorite song's lyrics that will end everyone's day on a high note.

The game Bingo is transformed in this lesson in which students use symbols and images to make connections to environmental print through the use of personalized Bingo cards.

Students can count on using the 3-2-1 strategy to help them successfully comprehend and write about an informational text.

Students use logos from everyday life to identify individual letters and then create their own captions for the images.