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.

Using different writing/drawing materials (e.g., markers, color pencils, pastels, etc.), students learn how to communicate different moods and/or feelings to support their written ideas and how authors do the same through their work.

This lesson supports third-through-sixth grade students as they communicate story setting to their readers through the use of visual image prompts. Activities include individual and cooperative learning group work, as well as whole class discussion.

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.

In this lesson, students build classroom community by exploring environmental print and a teacher-created display that focuses on a favorite book. They then create and share their own presentations.

Students use text sets to research a topic inspired by a fiction book they have read. A text set is a collection of multiple text genres with a single focus.

After exploring several question and answer books on a variety of topics, students research a topic and create their own class question and answer book.

During interactive read-aloud sessions, students identify how an author conveys mathematical information about animals' sizes and abilities. They then conduct research projects focusing on the same mathematical concepts.

Students adopt a skeptical stance and become weather detectives who ask "Why?" and "Why not?" as they investigate the history and validity of some common weather sayings.

Using Snowflake Bentley as a model, students create a working definition of multigenre text and then use that definition to create their own multigenre piece about winter or another theme.

This lesson pairs the reading of historical fiction with nonfiction to introduce students to the large themes of history.

Students read The Jolly Postman, in which a postman delivers letters to storybook characters. They explore different types of mail and categorize letters from the book and their own mail.

This lesson uses One Green Apple by Eve Bunting to teach how characters change across a text. It will also guide students through writing an epilogue to accompany their independent book.

In this series of four lessons, students will explore key elements of design in Little Blue and Little Yellow to learn about setting, character relationships, and plot.

After examining recipes written based on students' favorite fairy tales, students research a recipe related to their favorite story, book, or fairy tale and include it in a classroom recipe book.

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.

Students will participate in Collaborative Reasoning in small groups to discuss and think critically about issues of social justice and diversity by reading current events informational articles.

Students read thematically related texts, scaffolded from simple to complex, to help them gather necessary concept vocabulary and background knowledge in a content area. They then write acrostic poems to organize and present their learning in a creative way.

Students learn the importance of crediting others for their words and ideas, and then learn the paraphrasing and citation skills necessary to avoid plagiarism.

In this lesson from a research skills unit, students read informational text, looking for supporting details. They practice skimming and scanning print resources, and scrolling through electronic resources.