It is important for students to know how to evaluate messages conveyed by the news media. Exploration of the artistic techniques used in political cartoons leads to critical questioning.

Y'all set down a spell and learn ‘bout dialects!" In other words, your students will use The Color Purple to explore dialect and how it reveals information about the characters.

Students will be crawling all over this assignment when they use illustrations and text to learn about life from a bug's point of view.

The interactive read-aloud in this lesson helps students to identify and classify the three verb types—action, state-of-being or linking, and helping verbs.

Students take a fresh look at the revision process and help one another polish their written work through a peer-editing strategy that is simple, systematic, and constructive.

Students examine the fallacies that surround them every day, deconstruct fallacious images and messages in advertisements, and demonstrate their understanding of the fallacies through multimedia presentations.

Students in grades 4 and 5 discuss inferential comprehension and visualization as they use a think-aloud questioning strategy to develop a deeper understanding of a historical novel.

Students read "After Twenty Years" by O. Henry, use a word map to identify characters' qualities or traits, discuss the characters' feelings and actions, and reflect upon these in journals.

This lesson encourages students in grades 4 and 5 to think critically and write persuasively by focusing on preparing, presenting, and evaluating mock campaign speeches.

A is for zoo? Q is for duck? The alphabet as students know it is transformed when students create a class book that contains clever associations for each letter of the alphabet.

Students learn about the process of questioning and using webs to organize information during reading and then practice writing factual and inferential questions.

Students read biographies and explore websites of selected American authors and then role-play as the authors.

Students research mask-making from various cultures, highlight the masks' connections to cultural practices, compose poetry to reveal their understanding, analyze their own culture, and create personal masks and poetry.

Students read a work of realistic fiction about bullying and gain understanding through writing, Readers Theatre, and discussion.

Students learn how to effectively deal with bullying by participating in literature response groups and writing about when they experienced a similar situation or emotion as a fictional character.

A picture is worth a thousand words as students are guided in viewing wordless picture books and responding to four different types of questions about the images they see.

Imagination and application are key to this tall tale lesson in which students take what they know about tall tales to spin a yarn of their own.

"That's my position and I'm sticking to it!" After reading about the Korean War, students will take a position in response to an open-ended question, support their position, and evaluate that support.

Where did the stars come from? What makes lightning and thunder? Pourquoi tales are narratives developed by various cultures around the world to explain natural phenomena. Students study three tales and learn about their cultures of origin, then work cooperatively to write and present an original pourquoi tale.