In this strategy guide, you'll learn about Partner Talk—a way to provide students with another learning opportunity to make learning their own through collaboration and discussion.
Using Partner Talk to Strengthen Student Collaboration and Understanding
Using Paired Reading to Increase Fluency and Peer Cooperation
In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers. This strategy can also be used to pair older students with younger students to create "reading buddies."
Go Public!: Encouraging Student Writers to Publish
Intended for middle and high school teachers, Go Public! offers specific writing ideas and classroom activities to help students develop the confidence and ability to publish in a wide market.
Choosing, Chatting, and Collecting: Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy
Students identify interesting words from Shakespeare's plays and add them to a classroom vocabulary collection.
Reading Movies and TV: Learning the "Language" of Moving-Image Texts
Introduce students to the idea that movies and TV have their own language and grammar, which gives them special ways of telling their stories.
Using Children's Literature to Develop Classroom Community
Conversation and cooperation bring out the best in students when they hold dialogues about their individual strengths, abilities, and talents.
A Directed Listening-Thinking Activity for "The Tell-Tale Heart"
What's that sound? Students participate in a Directed ListeningThinking Activity (DLTA) using "The Tell-Tale Heart," make predictions, and respond in the form of an acrostic poem or comic strip.
Exploring and Sharing Family Stories
Writing gets personal when students interview family members in order to write a personal narrative about that person.
Give Them a Hand: Promoting Positive Interaction in Literature Circles
Students circle their desks as they analyze their own participation within a small group discussion.
The Magnetism of Language: Parts of Speech, Poetry, and Word Play
What wonderful ways words work! The parts of speech are the highlight of this lesson in which students identify parts of speech in a nonsensical poem and then create their own wild and wacky rhymes.
Developing Story Structure With Paper-Bag Skits
Lights, camera, action, and a bit of mystery! In this lesson, students use mystery props in a skit bag to create and perform in short, impromptu skits.
Lights, Camera, Action: Interviewing a Book Character
Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.
In the Poet's Shoes: Performing Poetry and Building Meaning
Students take poetic license when they interpret William Carlos William's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" to help create a poem of their own.
Digital Reflections: Expressing Understanding of Content Through Photography
Striking images can leave lasting impressions on viewers. In this lesson, students make textselfworld connections to a nature- or science-related topic as they collaboratively design a multimedia presentation.
Profile Publisher
Students use the Profile Publisher to draft online social networking profiles, yearbook profiles, and newspaper or magazine profiles for themselves, other real or fictional characters.
The Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children is announced today.
Students read and discuss an award-winning book before writing their own story that demonstrates compassion.
Today is World Read Aloud Day.
Students celebrate the power of words by reading aloud to their classmates and spreading the word of global literacy to their friends and family.