Give students an authentic reason to read and write by researching blogs written by their peers around the world and then writing their own.
Blogging in the Primary Grades? Yes, Indeed!
Engaging With Cause-and-Effect Relationships Through Creating Comic Strips
Students demonstrate their knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships by creating original comic strips and sharing their completed work in an oral presentation format.
Jazz Up Writing Workshop: Writing Biographies of African American Jazz Musicians
During writing workshop, students research, write, revise, and share their own comprehensive biographies of African American jazz musicians.
Learning About Research and Writing Using the American Revolution
Students across the board will get a kick out of researching a historical figure from the American Revolution to create an acrostic poem.
How-To Writing: Motivating Students to Write for a Real Purpose
It's not easy surviving fourth grade (or third or fifth)! In this lesson, students brainstorm survival tips for future fourth graders and incorporate those tips into an essay.
Delicious, Tasty, Yummy: Enriching Writing with Adjectives and Synonyms
Students thoroughly explore identifying synonyms and adjectives before using them to add variety and interest to their own writing.
Alliteration All Around
Students learn about alliteration, and then practice using alliteration in acrostic poems, tongue twisters, alphabet books, and number books.
The Connection Between Poetry and Music
Students won't miss a beat in this reading fluency lesson that combines music and poetry.
Building Classroom Community Through the Exploration of Acrostic Poetry
What do your students think about each other? Find out as you teach them the concepts of acrostic poems and challenge them to write an uplifting acrostic about a classmate.
Reading, Writing, Haiku Hiking! A Class Book of Picturesque Poems
Students learn haiku
write descriptive poems
and share with the class.
Writers' Workshop: The Biographical Sketch
Students use the faces and places they learn about in their research to write a biography about a contemporary or historical figure.
Reading and Writing About Pollution to Understand Cause and Effect
Students get to write a whale of a tale when they complete a graphic organizer sequencing the journey of a mountain fish to a polluted waterway.
Zines for Kids: Multigenre Texts About Media Icons
Special edition! Students use ReadWriteThink tools to create magazines about prominent figures using a variety of writing genres and styles.
Writing a Movie: Summarizing and Rereading a Film Script
Lights! Camera! Action! In this lesson, students view a scene with no dialogue from E.T., write a script for that scene, and perform a dramatic reading while the scene plays.
Multimedia Responses to Content Area Topics Using Fact-"Faction"-Fiction
Students climb into the mind of a spider in this lesson that asks them to compose a spider diary using spider facts, fiction, and "faction"fiction that sounds like fact.
Getting to Know You: Developing Short Biographies to Build Community
How well do your students know their peers? Students transform into investigative reporters as they interview a classmate, compile the biographical data into graphic form, and introduce the student to the class.
Two Thumbs Up! Get Students Writing and Publishing Book Reviews
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.
Storytelling in the Social Studies Classroom
People make the past come alive as students research and then share stories about famous Americans who promoted democratic ideals.
A Race With Grace: Sports Poetry in Motion
In this lesson, athletics, aesthetics, and poetics intersect in new ways as developing literacy learners experiment together with the forms of language.
Flying to Freedom: Tar Beach and The People Could Fly
Students look to the past and use historical context to compare and contrast two characters from folktales.