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

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 use Lord of the Flies to explore communication styles and techniques by writing text messages from one of the novel's characters to an imagined audience off the island.

After reading several examples of how a published author incorporates facts in fiction writing, students research a topic of their choice and write fictional diary entries that incorporate factual information.

Students choose unfamiliar words from their reading and create a multigenre, multimodal glossary of terms.

Students examine three examples of revisionist fairy tales in which female characters act in empowered roles rather than behaving helpless and submissive.

Using their prior knowledge of books containing letters, students show their understanding of genre by rewriting a story and reflecting on how traditional stories differs from stories told in letters.

Students use fractured fairy tales to practice revision and editing as separate activities when they write their own versions of fairy tales.

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 explore familiar literary characters, usually first encountered as adults, but whose childhood stories are only told later. Students then create childhoods for adult characters from books of their choice.

Students explore a range of resources on fair use and copyright then design their own audio public service announcements (PSAs), to be broadcast over the school's public address system.

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.

Capture students' enthusiasm for film and transfer it to reading and literature by substituting film production roles for the traditional literature circle roles.

Students create a soundtrack for a novel that they have read, as they engage in such traditional reading strategies as predicting, visualizing, and questioning.

Students analyze their past readings and use that knowledge to create reading plans for the future.

Students research the items listed in the song "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel, noting their historical relevance, and then document their findings using an online chart.

Explore reading strategies using Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and other works. Students read Poe's works in both large- and small-group readings then conclude with a variety of projects.

Students identify genre characteristics for short stories and newspaper articles then practice both genres by turning a short story into a news article and an article into a short story.