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.
More Than Sports Stories
Tune in to hear about works of sports fiction and nonfiction that explore issues of identity and belonging, courage and equal rights, and changes over time in American history and culture.
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.
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.
Exploring Disability Using Multimedia and the B-D-A Reading Strategy
History takes on new dimensions in this interactive multimedia lesson that emphasizes the B-D-A approach to research as students investigate the experiences of people with disabilities since the early 1800s.
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.
Jackie Robinson was born on this day in 1919.
Students read messages sent to the White House from Jackie Robinson and discuss his role as an athlete and a civil rights activist, as well as the role of athletes in society.
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.