Featuring descriptions and activities for fifty exceptional titles, Mary Jo Fresch and Peggy Harkins offer a wealth of ideas for harnessing the power of picture books to improve reading and writing in the content areas.
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
Teaching with Zooming Slideshows through Prezi
Through Prezi, a web application, students create "zooming" presentations for various purposes, such as presenting research, defending an opinion, or sharing a digital story.
Bringing Lessons to Life with Animoto
Using Animoto, a free Web 2.0 tool, students can develop short digital videos that include music, photos, video clips, and text as well as share their creations electronically.
Speak to Me: Teaching with Voki
Through Voki, a Web 2.0 tool, students create customizable avatars for class presentations for various purposes, such as presenting biographical information, expressing an opinion, or reading a poem.
Critical Literacy in Action: Multimodal Texts on Global Warming
Students will really warm up to this lesson about global warming as they study multimedia materials and use a variety of comprehension strategies.
Finding Solutions to Food Waste: Persuasion in a Digital World
Using various reading strategies and resources, students explore the issue of food waste. They also create persuasive arguments and blog posts examining this topic.
Engineering the Perfect Poem by Using the Vocabulary of STEM
Students research engineering careers and create poetry to understand the vocabulary of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
The Big, Bad Wolf...Is This a Fact?
Reading is revamped in this lesson in which students use a multimedia approach to study the books by Seymour Simon.
Digital Reflections: Expressing Understanding of Content Through Photography
Striking images can leave lasting impressions on viewers. In this lesson, students make textselfworld connections to a nature- or science-related topic as they collaboratively design a multimedia presentation.
On this day in 1907, Rachel Carson was born.
Students learn about Rachel Carson, explore different environmental websites, and write a Diamante Poem about a particular habitat.
Science-fiction author Ray Bradbury was born in 1920.
Students do a Bradbury author study and then create flyers to advertise their favorite story using the ReadWriteThink Printing Press.
Sally Ride, first American woman in space, was born in 1951.
After exploring information about Sally Ride on the StarKids Who's Who site, students write a letter using the Letter Generator to Dr. Ride's foundation, Sally Ride Science.
It's Raining Cats and Dogs! Make a Children's Book about the Weather
Kids learn about weather sayings throughout history while writing and illustrating a book for younger children.
The prototype for the World Wide Web was created in 1990.
Students look at pictures from the past using the WayBack Machine and brainstorm a few websites to explore to think about how they have changed over the years.