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.

In an effort to help motivate students to read nonfiction, students are challenged to use a timeline to help them name the year when certain products were invented.

Past meets present in this lesson in which students practice verb tense when they write personal short stories that they then publish in a flip book.

Students become online authors in this lesson in which they write and post a short story using wiki technology.

Students become "thieves" in this lesson as they use a previewing strategy to "steal" information from textbooks and other nonfiction texts before actually reading them.

Students become familiar with the similarities and differences between electronic and printed text by comparing the textual aids included in a textbook with those of an educational website.

Which side will win as students investigate both sides of the battle of using print versus online text for research as they learn about the lives of Civil War soldiers?