Students interview family members, and then create graphic family timelines based on important and memorable family events.
Creating Family Timelines: Graphing Family Memories and Significant Events
Our Classroom: Writing an Owner's Manual
Students write an owner's manual that helps them get to know their classroom, provides them with a sense of ownership, and lets others know about their classroom.
Looking at Landmarks: Using a Picture Book to Guide Research
This lesson uses Ben's Dream by Chris Van Allsburg to highlight ten major landmarks of the world. Students research the landmarks and present their findings to the class.
Creating Classroom Community by Crafting Themed Poetry Collections
Students create poetry collections with the theme of "getting to know each other." They study and then write a variety of forms of poetry to include in their collections.
Name Tag Glyphs
In this lesson, students practice a way to communicate without words by using a glyph. They create a name card using information about themselves. Students also interpret glyphs made by others.
A Recipe for Writing: Fairy Tale Feasts
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.
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.
Using Collaborative Reasoning to Support Critical Thinking
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.
Quantitative Civic Reasoning: A Guide for Centering Civic Innovation in Math and English Language Arts Classrooms
This guide explores quantitative civic reasoning in English and math classrooms.
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!
Read Across America Day: Celebrate a Nation of Diverse Readers
Bring the celebration of reading and literacy into your classroom, library, school, and home all year long.
Trading Card Creator
This tool provides a fun and useful way to explore a variety of topics such as a character in a book, a person or place from history, or even a physical object. An excellent tool to for summarizing or as a prewriting exercise for original stories.
Theme Poems
Formerly known as Shape Poems, this online tool allows elementary students to write poems in various shapes.
Connection Web
Students use this printout to expand on connections they have made to a text and use those details to write essays or create projects about the text.
Double-Entry Journal
This printout helps students record ideas and situations from texts in one column, and their reactions in the second, thus making a connection between the text and themselves, another text, or the world.
Making Connections
In this strategy guide, you'll learn to model how students can make three different kinds of connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world). Students then use this knowledge to find their own personal connections to a text.
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.
Using Paired Reading to Increase Fluency and Peer Cooperation
In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers. This strategy can also be used to pair older students with younger students to create "reading buddies."
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use.
Website Planning in a Bilingual Classroom
Students complete a family survey and plan a website to share the responses, increasing their understanding and appreciation of their own families and cultures, and their classmates as well.