This tool provides a fun and useful way to explore a variety of topics such as a character in a book, a person or place from history, or even a physical object. An excellent tool to for summarizing or as a prewriting exercise for original stories.
Trading Card Creator
Diamante Poems
This online tool enables students to learn about and write diamante poems.
Word Family Sort
This online activity helps students recognize word patterns by having them sort a series of words into short-vowel word families.
Acrostic Poems
This online tool enables students to learn about and write acrostic poems. Elements of the writing process are also included.
Theme Poems
Formerly known as Shape Poems, this online tool allows elementary students to write poems in various shapes.
Alphabet Organizer
Students use this online tool to create an alphabet chart or pages for an alphabet book.
Persuasion Map
The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.
Eye on Idioms
The activity includes a series of exercises, in which students view the literal representations of idioms and then examine the metaphorical meanings of the idioms.
Timeline
Students generate descriptive timelines and can include images in the description.
Letter Generator
The Letter Generator is a useful tool for students to learn the parts of a business or friendly letter and then compose and print letters for both styles of correspondence.
Picture Match
Picture Match is a matching game that reinforces the concept of beginning-letter and short- and long-vowel sounds.
Construct-a-Word
Using Construct-a-Word, students learn letter-sound correspondence by combining a beginning letter or blend to a word ending to create words.
Violent Red, Ogre Green, and Delicious White: Expanding Meaning Potential through Media
This article reports on the meaning potential of daily access to drawing/writing media for widening and deepening meaning construction.
Exploring the Past through Multigenre Writing
Research comes alive when students explore a range of alternate genres instead of writing the traditional research report.
Inquiry at the Window: The Year of the Birds
This science inquiry in a fourth-grade classroom affirms the importance of observation, questioning, reading, and writing to the inquiry process.
Codeswitching: Tools of Language and Culture Transform the Dialectally Diverse Classroom
This article shows how to affirm and draw on the dialect diversity of students to foster the learning of Standard English.
Making Connections
Using this printout, students make personal associations to a text by finding and describing text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections.
Narrative Pyramid
After students read a short story or chapter of a novel, they can use the Narrative Pyramid to reflect on key ideas and details.
Nonfiction Pyramid
After students read an article or other work of nonfiction, they can use the Nonfiction Pyramid to reflect on key ideas and details in the text.
Connection Stems
Connection Stems give students the language (and a reminder) to support their understanding by tying new learning to what they know about themselves and their world.