Students respond to a book they have read by thinking symbolically to create a business card for one of the characters.

Students work in groups to create annotated book reviews with links to topics of interest related to their book.

Students make bookmarks on computers and share their ideas with other readers at their school, while practicing summarizing, recognizing symbols, and writing reviews—all for an authentic audience.

Students analyze "choose your own adventure" stories and brainstorm to develop setting, characters, and plots for their own adventures stories and related Websites.

This minilesson guides student in using the PQP technique—Praise–Question–Polish—to offer concrete and useful peer review feedback.

Students often question whether a punctuation mark goes inside or outside the quotation marks, especially when writing dialogue. This lesson helps students identify the conventions and apply them to their text.

Students learn about paragraphing conventions in dialogue by revising their own writing.

Using the film The Sandlot, students are introduced to the literary devices of flashbacks and flash-forwards. They then write their own stories using those devices.

Through a series of picture book read-alouds, students engage in critical discussion of complex issues of race, class, and gender.

Students will be introduced to the term alliteration and create a headline poem consisting of 25 words that contain at least three examples of alliteration.

Did she walk, skip, amble, dance? In this minilesson, students explore connotation by acting out and revising the simple sentence "She walked into the room."

Students examine familiar car names for underlying connotations then proceed through a series of steps, increasing their control over language, until they select words with powerful connotations in their own writing.

In this autobiographical prewriting activity, students brainstorm important memories, choose graphics to represent these memories, and then rank the events as low or high points in their lives.

Students analyze personal homepages, as well as a character in a book they have read, and then create a homepage for the character.

Students increase their spelling accuracy and retention, while preserving fluency, by using sound, sight recall, and analyzing strategies instead of memorizing words, as they deal with spelling during drafting.

Students create a Detective's Handbook based on a detective mystery they have read. The handbooks include expository and descriptive writing, as well as a letter.

Students compose found and parallel poems based on a descriptive passage they have chosen from a piece of literature they are reading.

Students use their communication and writing skills as they interview a partner, write an article about them, and create a multimodal presentation to introduce their partner to the class.

Students examine leads in existing texts and create alternative leads for them before revising leads in their own writing.