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.
Songs of Our Lives: Using Lyrics to Write Stories
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.
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.
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.
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.
RAFT Writing Template
Students can utilize this printout to organize their writing as they learn to use the RAFT strategy. This printout enables students to clearly define their role, audience, format, and topic for writing.
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 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.
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.
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.
Promoting Cultural Values Through Alphabet Books
C is for Culture in this lesson in which students research a culture different from their own and compile an alphabet book that showcases cultural symbols for each letter of the alphabet.
Write-Talks: Students Discovering Real Writers, Real Audiences, Real Purposes
There's a world of writers out there, and in this lesson students discover them as they listen to presentations from local writers and learn about what, why, and how they write in their day-to-day lives.
Using Word Storms to Explore Vocabulary and Encourage Critical Thinking
Students learn that dogs are more than just pets in this lesson, which teaches them to use research and vocabulary-acquisition strategies to learn and write about working dogs.
Gwendolyn Brooks published Bronzeville Boys and Girls in 1956.
After students have read and discussed several poems from Brooks' collection, they create a poetry anthology for their own family, neighborhood, or classroom.
Sherman Alexie was born in 1966.
Students imagine they have been asked to participate in a museum exhibit, take photos/videos of a significant location, and write or record reflections. Students can also create an exhibit from something they have read.
Get ready for National Bullying Prevention Month!
Students create a poster to enter into a poster contest that educates others about issues surrounding bullying.
Black Beauty author Anna Sewell was born in 1820.
Through Sewell's novel, students explore the cruelty to animals and extend the discussion to current events, eventually presenting the information.
Today is Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko's birthday.
Students revive elements of the oral tradition by writing about something funny that happened to them recently, sharing with classmates, and discussing the changes that occur during the retelling of the stories.
Beware the Ides of March!
Students discuss and categorize superstitions, define a superstition, and compare the similarities and difference between proverbs and superstitions.