Students in grades 4–8 activate prior knowledge and research information about a historic event through fiction and nonfiction literature and exploration of relevant websites.
Beyond History Books: Researching With Twin Texts and Technology
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.
Lonely as a Cloud: Using Poetry to Understand Similes
Students identify similes in poetry and gain experience in using similes as a poetic device in their own work.
Buzz! Whiz! Bang! Using Comic Books to Teach Onomatopoeia
This lesson is sure to sizzle, not fizzle, as students use comic strips to find onomatopoetic words, develop a vocabulary list from the words, and discuss why writers use onomatopoeia.
What's in a Mystery? Exploring and Identifying Mystery Elements
Students identify the characteristics of mystery writing, outline a mystery story using a graphic organizer, write and revise their own mystery story, edit each other's work, and share their mysteries.
The Connection Between Poetry and Music
Students won't miss a beat in this reading fluency lesson that combines music and poetry.
Story Elements Alive!
What's in a narrative? Students find out in this lesson in which they explore four narrative elements—setting, characters, problem/solution, and plot, through purpose-driven read-alouds and independent reading.
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.
Alaska Native Stories: Using Narrative to Introduce Expository Text
Tradition and technology come together in this lesson in which students learn about Alaskan animals through Native American tales and their own online research.
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.
Exploring World Cultures Through Folk Tales
Journey around the world with students as they read a Japanese, African, or Welsh folk tale, create a visual depiction of the tale, research the tale's culture, and present findings.
Building a Learning Community: Crafting Rules for the Classroom
Students will learn to mind their ps and qs in this lesson on etiquette and appropriate behavior in the classroom.
Great American Inventors: Using Nonfiction to Learn About Technology Inventions
Who are the people behind the world's greatest inventions? Students read biographies of a terrific trio of American inventors and create presentations that highlight how their inventions from the past impacted the future.
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.
Multipurpose Poetry: Introducing Science Concepts and Increasing Fluency
Creepy crawlers, hoppers, and fliers are the focus of this lesson in which students chorally read poems about insects and use the Internet to locate facts about their assigned insects.
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.
Poetry: A Feast to Form Fluent Readers
Students improve their reading fluency by selecting a poem online to perform in class.
Story Map
The Story Map interactive is designed to assist students in prewriting and postreading activities by focusing on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution.
Today is Leap Day!
Our solar year is 365.24219 days. Since our calendar does not deal in partial days, every four years, we add an additional day to February.
Coretta Scott King was born on this day in 1927.
Students do a book report assignment based on a current or past winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award.