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

Students learn about the life and music of John Lennon, write a short story from their lives integrating lyrics from some of their favorite songs, and create a class book of stories.

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 use illustrations from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a guide to write mysteries and then present their stories to the class for students to discuss to which illustration each story corresponds.

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.

To prepare for literature circles featuring historical novels, students research the decades of the 1930s to the 1990s and share their information using Prezi, a web application for creating multimedia presentations.

After reading the book ¡Si, Se Puede!/Yes, We Can!: Janitor Strike in L.A., students learn about labor unions, strikes, and organizing for change. Students interview staff members in their school to learn about their daily work life, and write persuasive advocacy letters.

After researching various human-made disasters such as the BP oil spill, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Great Chicago Fire, students share their research in oral presentations. Then students pair up to compare and contrast their disasters using the Venn Diagram Student Interactive or the Venn diagram Mobile App.

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.

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

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.

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.