After listening to the beginning of a story, students use details in the text, personal experience, and prior knowledge to predict the way the story will end.

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 encourages children to explore authentic reasons for writing by writing messages to their family in a family message journal.

This lesson introduces Family Message Journals—a teacher-tested tool for encouraging family involvement and supporting writing to reflect and to learn.

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.

Book Boosts—one-minute raves at the end of independent reading time—are easy ways to suggest new titles to students, and they act as a way for students to have something to think about as they read.

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.

Students use themed graphic organizers to compose cinquain poems on topics common in the early elementary classroom.

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.

Students respond to self-selected books in journals, and talk about their books daily in small groups. The teacher guides students by offering suggestions and writing with them in dialogue journals.

Reinforce student understanding of parts of speech through the analysis of sample cinquain poems followed by the creation of original cinquains.

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

After listening to haiku poetry, students use seasonal descriptive words to write their own haiku, following the traditional format. They then publish their poems by mounting them on illustrated backgrounds.

Students build positive memories of literacy activities when they take turns taking home a book bag stuffed with items to encourage literacy interactions with their families.

Students play with and explore prepositions during a whole group reading of Ruth Heller's Behind the Mask, and then by composing and publishing prepositional poems based on the book's style.

In this lesson students explore a number of sources to create a biographical timeline about a selected person. Students collaboratively research and resolve conflicting information they find during their investigation.

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.