Students learn about the life and music of John Lennon, write a short story from their lives integrating lyrics from some of their favorite songs, and create a class book of stories.

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.

Students use illustrations from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a guide to write mysteries and then present their stories to the class for students to discuss to which illustration each story corresponds.

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.

Students explore how their problem-solving strategies work by writing in math journals as they work in small groups to solve a math puzzle with multiple solutions.

Students explore a variety of sources for information about voting. They evaluate the information to determine if it is fact or opinion, and then create a graffiti wall about voting.

Students increase their media literacy skills by critically examining and revising junk mail.

After researching various natural disasters, students share their findings with each other using glogs, or through poster presentations.

By being present and mindful on nature walks, students write haiku using vivid sensory language; and explore body movement, music and art as visual and kinesthetic representations of their poetry.

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.

In this alternative book report, students identify the elements of fiction in books they have read by creating glogs, interactive multimedia posters, and then share their glogs.

In this lesson, students examine and create holiday/event cards, analyze holiday elements, and create their own. The activities help students focus on the reasons for composing messages as they do.

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.

What drives changes to classic myths and fables? In this lesson students evaluate the changes Disney made to the myth of "Hercules" in order to achieve their audience and purpose.

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.

Teachers guide students to carefully view images from the Civil Rights Movement and write captions that accurately describe the images and/or their probable purposes.

This lesson challenges students' views of Native Americans as a vanished people by asking them to compare their prior knowledge with information they gather while reading about contemporary Native Americans.

Students compare a book to its film adaptation, and then perform readers theater of a scene from the book that they feel was not well represented in the movie version.