Students analyze characterization by creating their own superheroes or super-villains, complete with related gadgets and settings.

Students learn about the life and music of John Lennon, write a short story from their lives integrating lyrics from some of their favorite songs, and create a class book of stories.

Students rework their forgotten/abandoned drafts by cutting and covering up selected words. By creatively manipulating text, they explore portal writing, a strategy for envisioning a new story or story direction.

Students practice writing detailed, sensory-rich descriptions by framing a small piece of nature and freewriting about it. From this minilesson, students can develop a variety of types of writing.

Students use illustrations from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a guide to write mysteries and then present their stories to the class for students to discuss to which illustration each story corresponds.

After reading several examples of how a published author incorporates facts in fiction writing, students research a topic of their choice and write fictional diary entries that incorporate factual information.

Students choose unfamiliar words from their reading and create a multigenre, multimodal glossary of terms.

Students examine three examples of revisionist fairy tales in which female characters act in empowered roles rather than behaving helpless and submissive.

Using their prior knowledge of books containing letters, students show their understanding of genre by rewriting a story and reflecting on how traditional stories differs from stories told in letters.

Students use fractured fairy tales to practice revision and editing as separate activities when they write their own versions of fairy tales.

Readers are often transported to the places mentioned in texts through words and descriptions. This lesson invites students to create travel brochures about the setting of texts they have read.

Students write a persuasive letter to the editor of a newspaper from a selected fictional character's perspective, focusing on a specific issue or situation explored in the novel.

Students create alphabet books, which are used as an integrated assessment with science, health, social studies, and any other content area. This lesson plans looks at the theme of community.

Students explore the menu genre by analyzing existing menus from local restaurants. They review adjectives and descriptive writing and then work in groups to create their own custom menus.

Children find favorite words, phrases, and sentences from familiar stories. Working together, they combine their words and phrases to create a poem. The poem is then shared as performance poetry.

Students identify, explore and apply the elements of circle plot structures to their own stories by using graphic organizers, reading and writing stories, and using checklists to assess their work.

After reading two math-related books, students investigate their home and school environments to find examples of objects that come in sets and then create their own books on sets.

Students stage a mock trial for a literary character, with groups of students acting as the prosecution, defense, and jury.

Students explore a variety of resources as they learn about the Holocaust. Working collaboratively, they investigate the materials, prepare oral responses, and produce a topic-based newspaper to complete their research.