Students analyze characterization by creating their own superheroes or super-villains,
complete with related gadgets and settings.
Fantastic Characters: Analyzing and Creating Superheroes and Villains
Cut up, Cover up, and Come Away with Ideas for Writing!
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.
Brave New Words: Novice Lexicography and the Oxford English Dictionary
Students become novice lexicographers as they explore recent new entries to the dictionary, learn the process of writing entries for the Oxford English Dictionary, and write a new entry themselves.
Choose, Select, Opt, or Settle: Exploring Word Choice in Poetry
Students investigate the effects of word choice in Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star" to construct a more sophisticated understanding of speaker, subject, and tone.
Language and Power in The Handmaid's Tale and the World
Students work in small groups to examine Margaret Atwood's use of and observations about language in The Handmaid's Tale. Through this activity, students discover and articulate overarching thematic trends in the book and then can extend their observations about official or political language to examples from their own world.
Sonic Patterns: Exploring Poetic Techniques Through Close Reading
Students develop close reading skills connecting sound with sense in the poem "Those Winter Sundays," and write an original text that reflects their new learning.
Building Vocabulary: Making Multigenre Glossaries Based on Student Inquiry
Students choose unfamiliar words from their reading and create a multigenre, multimodal glossary of terms.
Supporting Vocabulary Development with EASE
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.
Entering History: Nikki Giovanni and Martin Luther King, Jr.
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.
Finding the Science Behind Science Fiction through Paired Readings
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.
The Comic Book Show and Tell
Students craft comic scripts using clear, descriptive, and detailed writing that shows (illustrates) and tells (directs). After peers create an artistic interpretation of the script, students revise their original scripts.
Onomatopoeia: A Figurative Language Minilesson
Clang, clash, or tinkle? Students explore the use of onomatopoeia in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" before choosing their own sound words in response to specific sounds.
Focusing Reader Response Through Vocabulary Analysis
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.
Exploring the Power of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Words through Diamante Poetry
Students explore the ways that powerful and passionate words communicate the concepts of freedom, justice, discrimination, and the American Dream in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Avoiding Sexist Language by Using Gender-Fair Pronouns
Students engage in a brief writing assignment that concretely illustrates how language and gender stereotyping interact causally.
Picture This: Student Created Online Vocabulary Flashcards
Let the students be the vocabulary experts! Prior to whole class instruction, students create online flashcards and teach the class the new vocabulary.
Exploring the Power of Language with Six-Word Memoirs
What do the words we write really have to say about us? In this lesson, students examine the power of word choice as they write six-word memoirs of their lives.
"Roused by the Change of Scene": Analyzing a Film Adaptation of Jane Eyre
As part of their study of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, students read selected sections of the novel closely and compare their representation in the text to representations in the 2007 Masterpiece adaptation of Jane Eyre. They use the concepts of time/pacing, character, and theme to focus their analysis and to plan an adaptation of a scene of their choice.
Highlighting Out-of-School Language Expertise with Pop Culture Dictionaries
Students compose dictionary entries for words and phrases from pop culture texts (e.g., television shows, movies, lyrics, YouTube videos), connecting their definitions to their personal use of the terms.
A-B-C: It's Easy as 1-2-3 to Make Math Alphabet Books
Using the Alphabet Organizer app, students create alphabet books to review math terms.