Students analyze characterization by creating their own superheroes or super-villains, complete with related gadgets and settings.

Students rework their forgotten/abandoned drafts by cutting and covering up selected words. By creatively manipulating text, they explore portal writing, a strategy for envisioning a new story or story direction.

Students choose unfamiliar words from their reading and create a multigenre, multimodal glossary of terms.

This lesson allows teachers to enrich students' oral and written vocabulary using the EASE sequence of instruction: Enunciate, Associate, Synthesize, and Emphasize the words you want students to use.

Nikki Giovanni's poem "The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr." is paired with Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, taking students on a quest through time to the Civil Rights movement.

Students read science fiction texts and then use nonfiction texts to extrapolate the scientific principles presented as they discuss the "what ifs" within the context of scientific principles.

Students suggest and categorize words that they associate with a novel they have recently read, ranging from details about the plot to feelings about a character.

Let the students be the vocabulary experts! Prior to whole class instruction, students create online flashcards and teach the class the new vocabulary.

Using the Alphabet Organizer app, students create alphabet books to review math terms.

Students must "become" a character in a novel in order to describe themselves and other characters using powerful adjectives.

Students explore poetry about sports, looking closely at the use of onomatopoeia. After viewing a segment of a sporting event, students create their own onomatopoeic sports poems.

This lesson teaches students how to use old verbs in a new way, thus creating new and fresh descriptive phrases.

Engage students in content area reading with the Textmasters strategy, which allows students to collaborate with their peers in different roles that enable better understanding of the content.

Students learn that you don't have to raise your voice to raise a point. Writing a persuasive letter to your principal is a great way to get your opinions heard.

Students write descriptions of characters, incorporate new vocabulary words, practice using simile and metaphor, engage in peer editing, and post their revised descriptions on the walls for a matching game.

Students use word webs to choose synonyms for generic adjectives and to learn to adjust their word usage for different contexts.

V is for vocabulary. A content area unit provides the theme for a specialized ABC book, as students select, research, define, and illustrate a word for each alphabet letter.

How do poets play with language? Students will explore some answers to this question as they search through poems for examples of alliteration, assonance, simile, and rhyme.