Students create a checklist outlining what effective writers do, revise his or her own writing, and engage in a written conversation to help peers with the revision process.
Prompting Revision through Modeling and Written Conversations
Creating Family Timelines: Graphing Family Memories and Significant Events
Students interview family members, and then create graphic family timelines based on important and memorable family events.
Talking Poetry with Blabberize
Students will be motivated to share their poetry through an online tool the features recording and animation.
Boars and Baseball: Making Connections
In this lesson, students will make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections after reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. After sharing and discussing connections, students choose and plan a project that makes a personal connection to the text.
Charlotte is Wise, Patient, and Caring: Adjectives and Character Traits
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.
Myth and Truth: Independence Day
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.
Daily Book Boosts
Book Boostsone-minute raves at the end of independent reading timeare 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.
Composing Cinquain Poems with Basic Parts of Speech
Reinforce student understanding of parts of speech through the analysis of sample cinquain poems followed by the creation of original cinquains.
Seasonal Haiku: Writing Poems to Celebrate Any Season
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.
Playing with Prepositions through Poetry
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.
Rosa Parks was born on this day in 1913.
Rosa Parks was committed to the struggle for social justice and human rights until her death, inspiring millions of people around the world. Today, we celebrate her!
2025 NCTE Annual Convention
Each November thousands of literacy educators from across the country make the journey to a Convention that inspires their practice and rejuvenates their profession.
Eye on Idioms
The activity includes a series of exercises, in which students view the literal representations of idioms and then examine the metaphorical meanings of the idioms.
Podcasts: The Nuts and Bolts of Creating Podcasts
Use this helpful tool to integrate podcasts into your classroom or to help your students create their own podcasts with audio and images.
Persuasion Map
Use this graphic organizer to develop a persuasive stance for an essay, speech, poster, or any type of assignment that incorporates persuasion.
Using the Think-Pair-Share Technique
In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and classroom topics to encourage a high degree of classroom participation and assist students in developing a conceptual understanding of a topic through the use of the Think-Pair-Share technique.
Using the Jigsaw Cooperative Learning Technique
In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and texts to allow for learning that meets the diverse needs of students but keeps student groups flexible.
Peer Review
This strategy guide explains how you can employ peer review in your classroom, guiding students as they offer each other constructive feedback to improve their writing and communication skills.
Persuasive Writing
This strategy guide focuses on persuasive writing and offers specific methods on how you can help your students use it to improve their critical writing and thinking skills.
Performing Literature to Promote Fluency and Comprehension
This study guide outlines three reading methods--Readers Theatre, choral reading, and performing poetry-- that can be used to promote fluency and comprehension.