Students first analyze Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," then use Whitman's poem as a model as they create their own list poems.
Walt Whitman as a Model Poet: "I Hear My School Singing"
Grades
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Choosing the Best Verb: An Active and Passive Voice Minilesson
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Minilesson
Students explore how active and passive voices are appropriate to different audiences. They examine online resources, and then draw conclusions about verb use, which they apply to their own writing.
Grades
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Avoiding Sexist Language by Using Gender-Fair Pronouns
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students engage in a brief writing assignment that concretely illustrates how language and gender stereotyping interact causally.
Grades
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Breaking the Rules with Sentence Fragments
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Though teachers usually caution students against using sentence fragments, Edgar Schuster's work demonstrates that professional writers often use fragments effectively. This lesson helps students understand that there are reasons that they can and should use sentence fragments to become effective writers.
Grades
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The Passion of Punctuation
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Unit
Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).
Grades
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Style-Shifting: Examining and Using Formal and Informal Language Styles
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students observe how language features vary when shifting from an informal to a formal style or vice versa. By engaging in style shifting in both speech and writing, students become aware of how we all change language styles depending on the contexts in which we are speaking or writing.
Grades
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From Quantitative to Qualitative: Writing Descriptions of Data From Tables
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students develop quantitative reasoning and critical thinking by analyzing descriptions tables for content, language, and organization with a particular focus on verb tense selection, and then writing descriptions of tables themselves.
Grades
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Read Across America Day: Celebrate a Nation of Diverse Readers
K - 12
Calendar Activity
| Literacy-Related Event
Bring the celebration of reading and literacy into your classroom, library, school, and home all year long.
Grades
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Reading & Writing & Teens: A Parent's Guide to Adolescent Literacy
6 - 12
Professional Library
| Book
Offering advice from a host of experts in adolescent literacy, this book helps answer real questions from parents across the country about how to best support their teens as readers and writers.
Grades
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Analyzing Grammar Rants: An Alternative to Traditional Grammar Instruction
8 - 12
Professional Library
| Journal
Kenneth Lindblom and Patricia A. Dunn teach language awareness and use through published complaints about the teaching of grammar. Students are able to recognize issues of race and class that determine acceptable usage and learn the importance of audience in their own language use.
Grades
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Reading on the Go
Grades
5 - 12
Strategy Guide
In this Strategy Guide, learn how to prepare yourself and your students for reading and note-taking in mobile environments.
Grades
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To Grammar or Not to Grammar: That Is Not the Question!
5 - 9
Professional Library
| Journal
Argues that, taught in the context of writing, grammar can enhance and improve students' writing. Offers classroom examples showing how: good preparation for writing fosters good grammar and detail; students can use grammatical and syntactic constructions used by professional authors as models for their own writing; and how to help students learn revision strategies at the sentence and paragraph level.
Grades
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Engaging Grammar: Practical Advice for Real Classrooms
7 - 12
Professional Library
| Book
Amy Benjamin challenges the idea of "skill and drill" grammar instruction, and Tom Oliva provides a teacher's journal chronicling how the concepts in this book can work in a real classroom.
Grades
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Grammar Alive!: A Guide for Teachers
K - 12
Professional Library
| Book
NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar provides this much-needed resource for teachers who wonder what to do about grammar—how to teach it, how to apply it, how to learn what they themselves were never taught.
Grades
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And I Quote: A Punctuation Proofreading Minilesson
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Minilesson
Students review the basic conventions for using quotations from literature or references from a research project, focusing on accurate punctuation and page layout, then apply the conventions to their texts.
Grades
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Constructing New Understanding Through Choral Readings of Shakespeare
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
After reading The Tempest or any other play by William Shakespeare, students work in small groups to plan, compose, and perform a choral reading based on a character or theme.
Grades
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Analyzing Grammar Pet Peeves
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
By analyzing Dear Abby's "rant" about bad grammar usage, students become aware that attitudes about race, social class, moral and ethical character, and "proper" language use are intertwined.
Grades
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I Remember That Book: Rereading as a Critical Investigation
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Curl up with a good book againor not. In this lesson, students brainstorm why they reread some books, while passing up others, and write their reflections in an essay.
Grades
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Semicolons and Swift: Analyzing Punctuation and Meaning
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
This lesson will help punctuation make a mark on students as they read Jonathan Swift's work and analyze his use of punctuation.