The Compare & Contrast Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for different kinds of comparison essays.
Compare & Contrast Map
Essay Map
The Essay Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for an informational, definitional, or descriptive essay.
Fractured Fairy Tales
The Fractured Fairy Tale tool encourages students to create their own fractured fairy tales.
Mystery Cube
The Mystery Cube helps students identify and summarize story elements in this popular genre. It can be used as a postreading or prewriting activity.
Bio Cube
Bio Cube is a useful summarizing tool that helps students identify and list key elements about a person for a biography or autobiography.
Trading Card Creator
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.
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.
Sharing Stories and Developing Multiple Perspectives in Post-9/11 Classrooms
Sensitive to the increased importance of valuing diversity and diverse points of view since 9/11, this article describes activities through which ESL students contribute new knowledge to their classes while simultaneously improving their English language skills.
I-Search in the Age of Information
Middle school teacher Huntington Lyman takes a fresh look at the I-Search research method and shows how it can be modified to provide an effective project for middle school students.
Ethics as a Form of Critical and Rhetorical Inquiry in the Writing Classroom
What can improve students' engagement in persuasive writing? A strong ethical dilemma and strategies for developing intelligent responses.