In this minilesson, students explore the use of dialogue tags such as "he said" or "she answered" in picture books and novels, discussing their purpose, form, and style.

Multidimensional, challenging, and popular with students, comics provide an excellent way to introduce the concept of genres.

In this lesson, students practice a way to communicate without words by using a glyph. They create a name card using information about themselves. Students also interpret glyphs made by others.

In this lesson, students conduct a science experiment and later discuss the events of the lab during shared writing. Students explain the procedure in their own words and then revise to include content specific vocabulary. Finally, students reflect on new words added to their writing using the Trading Card Creator interactive.

Students will participate in Collaborative Reasoning in small groups to discuss and think critically about issues of social justice and diversity by reading current events informational articles.

Students find examples of adjectives in a shared reading. Then students "become" major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using powerful adjectives.

By exploring myths and truths surrounding Independence Day, students think critically about commonly believed stories regarding the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the Independence Day holiday.

Students are guided through the process of taking notes while reading factual information, then turning those notes into new sentences and paragraphs written in their own words.

Students celebrate a novel they have read and get hands-on experience with technical writing by creating a board game based on the novel and writing the instructions for it.

Students use a graphic organizer to analyze setting development in picture books. They then apply what they have learned to their own writing.

Students explore letter poems and experiment with writing letters as poems, using the placement of line breaks to enhance rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance.

Students read various poems and explore why lines are broken where they are and how they affect rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance in poetry.

Students discuss and chart letter elements and write their own letters to adults at school, reinforcing letter-writing skills beyond the classroom lesson.

This lesson describes how small groups of students can plan meetings to discuss what they've read in a "just for fun" book club they've organized—and that they control.

This lesson challenges students' views of Native Americans as a vanished people by asking them to compare their prior knowledge with information they gather while reading about contemporary Native Americans.

Working in small groups, students compose found and parallel poems based on a descriptive passage they have chosen from a piece of literature they are reading.

Modeled on the activities in Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster, a picture book, students combine vocabulary exploration with word play by planning their own vocabulary parade.

Students compare a book to its film adaptation, and then perform readers theater of a scene from the book that they feel was not well represented in the movie version.

Picture books provide the basis for an analysis of fairy tale elements before students write their own original tales.

Students practice different ways of collaborating to read a work of literature. They work in different roles as they compose and answer questions, discover new vocabulary, and examine literary elements.