This tool provides a fun and useful way to explore a variety of topics such as a character in a book, a person or place from history, or even a physical object. An excellent tool to for summarizing or as a prewriting exercise for original stories.
Trading Card Creator
Diamante Poems
This online tool enables students to learn about and write diamante poems.
Acrostic Poems
This online tool enables students to learn about and write acrostic poems. Elements of the writing process are also included.
Alphabet Organizer
Students use this online tool to create an alphabet chart or pages for an alphabet book.
Persuasion Map
The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.
Flip-a-Chip
The Flip-a-Chip activity provides hands-on practice with affixes and roots, and also promotes comprehension through structural analysis and vocabulary in context.
Timeline
Students generate descriptive timelines and can include images in the description.
Letter Generator
The Letter Generator is a useful tool for students to learn the parts of a business or friendly letter and then compose and print letters for both styles of correspondence.
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.
360 Degrees of Text: Using Poetry to Teach Close Reading and Powerful Writing
Through Eileen Murphy Buckley's 360-degree approach to teaching critical literacy, students investigate texts through a full spectrum of learning modalities, harnessing the excitement of performance, imitation, creative writing, and argument/debate activities to become more powerful thinkers, readers, and writers.
Beyond Standardized Truth: Improving Teaching and Learning through Inquiry-Based Reading Assessment
Scott Filkins brings us into his and colleagues' classrooms to demonstrate how high school teachers across the disciplines can engage in inquiry-based reading assessment to support student learning. This book is part of the NCTE Principles in Practice imprint.
Fresh Perspectives on New Literacies and Technology Integration
This article provides practical ideas for integrating technologies into the classroom in ways that honor students' out-of-school technology funds of knowledge.
The Middle School High Five: Strategies Can Triumph
A literacy support teacher leads a district-wide initiative to organize content-area teachers in an effort to help their students become better readers by offering instruction and practice in five reading strategies across the curriculum.
Authentic Assessments for the English Classroom
Joanna Dolgin, Kim Kelly, and Sarvenaz Zelkha offer real-world examples, sample student work, step-by-step instructions, and handouts to help teachers incorporate authentic forms of assessment into the middle and high school curriculum.
What Works in Writing Instruction: Research and Practices
Through teacher-friendly language and classroom examples, Deborah Dean takes a close look at effective, research-based practices for writing instruction.
Reading for Learning: Using Discipline-Based Texts to Build Content Knowledge
Heather Lattimer provides practical, classroom-tested approaches to helping students access and critically respond to content-based texts.
Reading & Writing & Teens: A Parent's Guide to Adolescent Literacy
Offering advice from a host of experts in adolescent literacy, this book helps answer real questions from parents across the country about how to best support their teens as readers and writers.
Walking the Talk: Examining Privilege and Race in a Ninth-Grade Classroom
The authors describe their struggles and eventual success with students in constructing a "counternarrative to colormuteness and colorblindness"—the self-imposed student segregation and silencing of voice.
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.
Violent Red, Ogre Green, and Delicious White: Expanding Meaning Potential through Media
This article reports on the meaning potential of daily access to drawing/writing media for widening and deepening meaning construction.