Bring the celebration of reading and literacy into your classroom, library, school, and home all year long.
Read Across America Day: Celebrate a Nation of Diverse Readers
Mystery Cube
The Mystery Cube helps students identify and summarize story elements in this popular genre. It can be used as a postreading or prewriting activity.
Trading Card Creator
This tool provides a fun and useful way to explore a variety of topics such as a character in a book, a person or place from history, or even a physical object. An excellent tool to for summarizing or as a prewriting exercise for original stories.
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
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.
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.
Beyond "What I Did on Vacation": Exploring the Genre of Travel Writing
After reading and analyzing short examples of travel writing and discussing conventions of the genre, students write their own travel articles.
Poetry: Sound and Sense
Students' groans about studying poetry may disappear with this lesson in which students read poetry from various writers and use these poems to examine the sounds and sense of language.
Celebrate the National Day on Writing®!
Students examine the different ways that they write and think about the role writing plays in life.
Valentine's Day is today!
Students find examples of figurative language and write an original example of each device, illustrate, and share them with the class.
The Lunar New Year starts today.
Today is the first day of the New Year on the Chinese lunar calendar.
Take part in the African American Read-In!
Students come together with family and friends to take part in a read-in of books by African American authors and report their results.
Celebrate National Family Literacy Day!
Parents, grandparents, and other family members are invited to the classroom for a family-school reading day.
It's Independence Day! Or is it?
Students consider why there are so many different dates associated with the Declaration of Independence and why the nation's birthday is celebrated on July 4.
Celebrate Juneteenth!
Students use the Venn Diagram to compare Juneteenth celebrations to Fourth of July celebrations and hypothesize about the differences.
A Christmas Carol was the first book transmitted over radio!
Students write a script for A Christmas Carol on a level that primary students can read and perform. Older students record the performance and create a website to showcase photographs.
Celebrate the 100th day of school!
As a class, students work in small groups to create a "100th Day" book.
Hispanic Heritage Month begins today.
Students brainstorm all the various aspects of Latinx culture and compile topics to research. Groups then research topics and present their information to the class.
Patriot Day is celebrated today on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001.
Students write about the name "Patriot Day" and how it marks the anniversary of a huge disaster. An alternative assignment could be to ask students to record their reflections about 9/11.
Today is Cinco de Mayo.
Students choose to research a piece of art, music, dance, literature, or food that suitably represents Mexico and create a presentation for the class.
TeenTober?!? Learn about this month-long celebration.
TeenTober is a nationwide celebration hosted by libraries every October and aims to celebrate teens, promote year-round teen services and the innovative ways teen services helps teens learn new skills, and fuel their passions in and outside the library.