Bring the celebration of reading and literacy into your classroom, library, school, and home all year long.
Read Across America Day: Celebrate a Nation of Diverse Readers
Fact Fragment Frenzy
Fact Fragment Frenzy provides elementary students with an online model for finding facts in nonfiction text, then invites students to find facts in five sample passages.
Stapleless Book
The Stapleless Book can be used for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating vocabulary booklets . . . the possibilities are endless!
Cube Creator
The interactive Cube Creator helps students identify and summarize key elements. It can be used as a prewriting or postreading activity.
K-W-L Creator
This tool allows students to create an online K-W-L chart. Saving capability makes it easy for them to start the chart before reading and then return to it to reflect on what they learned.
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.
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
Featuring descriptions and activities for fifty exceptional titles, Mary Jo Fresch and Peggy Harkins offer a wealth of ideas for harnessing the power of picture books to improve reading and writing in the content areas.
Technology That Powers Up Learning
By designing lessons to activate prior knowledge and linking these activities to reading and writing, teachers found that students were more engaged, that they learned more material more quickly, and that they more willingly incorporated reading into their lives.
Connection Stems
Connection Stems give students the language (and a reminder) to support their understanding by tying new learning to what they know about themselves and their world.
Venn Diagram, 3 Circles
Students use this graphic organizer to describe similarities and differences between three objects or ideas.
Exit Slips
This printout provides prompts that help students reflect on and process new information and think critically, and offers teachers the opportunity to differentiate upcoming instruction based on these reflections.
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.
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 RAFT Writing Strategy
This strategy guide introduces the RAFT technique and offers practical ideas for using this technique to teach students to experiment with various perspectives in their writing.
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.
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.
Facilitating Participation with Silent Conversations
This guide introduces silent conversations, a collaborative learning technique that has students
thinking, sharing, and reflecting about important questions—but through writing rather than talk.
Using Concept Circles to Develop Academic Vocabulary
In this guide, you will learn how to use the Concept Circles strategy to support vocabulary development and comprehension of complex text.