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
Graphing Plot and Character in a Novel
In this graphical mapping project, students assign a value to the events, characters, and themes in a novel and think about how the elements of the story are all interconnected.
Audience & Purpose: Evaluating Disney's Changes to the Hercules Myth
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.
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.
Cultural Connections and Writing for Change
A little understanding can go a long way. After learning about difficulties that Palestinian youths face, students will write a letter to an official discussing these issues.
Pourquoi Stories: Creating Tales to Tell Why
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.
Flying to Freedom: Tar Beach and The People Could Fly
Students look to the past and use historical context to compare and contrast two characters from folktales.
Book Cover Creator
The Book Cover Creator is designed to allow users to type and illustrate front book covers, front and back covers, and full dust jackets. Students can use the tool to create new covers for books that they read as well as to create covers for books they write individually or as a class.
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.
Celebrate National Library Week!
Students learn more about libraries as part of National Library Week.
Books Will Take You There!
While enjoying a book that features a journey, children write postcards from the perspective of the main character for each stop along the trip.