Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.
Lights, Camera, Action: Interviewing a Book Character
Building Reading Comprehension Through Think-Alouds
Students learn components of think-alouds and type-of-text interactions through teacher modeling. In the process, students develop the ability to use think-alouds to aid in reading comprehension tasks.
A is for Apple: Building Letter-Recognition Fluency
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.
Using a Predictable Text to Teach High-Frequency Words
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.
Creative Writing Through Wordless Picture Books
Students are exposed to wordless picture books and begin developing story lines, both orally and in writing, using an online, interactive story map.
Fighting Injustice by Studying Lessons of the Past
Social injustice occurs every day all over the world. In this lesson, students research a few historical examples of social injustice, including the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, and Japanese internment.
Generating Rhymes: Developing Phonemic Awareness
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.
Building Phonemic Awareness With Phoneme Isolation
Students improve phonemic awareness through games and chants that help them isolate beginning and ending sounds and connect them with their written symbols (graphemes).
Gingerbread Phonics
"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.
Using THIEVES to Preview Nonfiction Texts
Students become "thieves" in this lesson as they use a previewing strategy to "steal" information from textbooks and other nonfiction texts before actually reading them.
From Fact to Fiction: Drawing and Writing Stories
Students gather factual information about frogs and toads to create nonfiction and fiction stories. Drawing is used for prewriting.
The Big, Bad Wolf...Is This a Fact?
Reading is revamped in this lesson in which students use a multimedia approach to study the books by Seymour Simon.
Getting the ig in Pig: Helping Children Discover Onset and Rime
Students will need their language-building hard hats as they construct words using onset and rime, building vocabulary and phonics comprehension.
Critical Media Literacy: Commercial Advertising
By looking at advertising and mass media critically, students begin to understand how the media oppresses certain groups, convinces people to purchase certain products, and influences culture.
Critical Media Literacy: TV Programs
By critically analyzing popular television programs, students develop an awareness of the messages that are portrayed through the media.
Scaffolding Comprehension Strategies Using Graphic Organizers
Students learn collaborative strategic reading (CSR). During and after reading, students apply four reading strategiespreview, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap-upand use graphic organizers for scaffolding.
Compare and Contrast Electronic Text With Traditionally Printed Text
Students become familiar with the similarities and differences between electronic and printed text by comparing the textual aids included in a textbook with those of an educational website.
Finding Figurative Language in The Phantom Tollbooth
Students examine figurative language in The Phantom Tollbooth and create a chart representing the literal and figurative meanings of words and phrases.
In the Poet's Shoes: Performing Poetry and Building Meaning
Students take poetic license when they interpret William Carlos William's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" to help create a poem of their own.
History Comes Alive: Developing Fluency and Comprehension Using Social Studies
Let the power of imagination and inference serve as a "time machine" to bring Benjamin Franklin into the classroom! History and science come to life in a dialogue with Franklin the inventor, developed through lesson activities that incorporate research, imagination, writing, visual arts, and drama.