This lesson encourages students in grades 4 and 5 to think critically and write persuasively by focusing on preparing, presenting, and evaluating mock campaign speeches.

A is for zoo? Q is for duck? The alphabet as students know it is transformed when students create a class book that contains clever associations for each letter of the alphabet.

Like Junie B. Jones, students will be saying "Wait till you hear this" after listening to a Junie B. story and creating mystery boxes to help retell the story.

Students explore the role of prefixes, as well as their origins and meanings, and examine how the understanding of prefixes can improve comprehension, decoding, and spelling.

Students read a work of realistic fiction about bullying and gain understanding through writing, Readers Theatre, and discussion.

Imagination and application are key to this tall tale lesson in which students take what they know about tall tales to spin a yarn of their own.

"That's my position and I'm sticking to it!" After reading about the Korean War, students will take a position in response to an open-ended question, support their position, and evaluate that support.

Did Paul Bunyan gouge out the Grand Canyon before or after he dug the Great Lakes? Students create a life-sized timeline showing the sequence of events in this tall tale.

What is it like to have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? Students find out in this lesson in which they "become" the characters in Judith Viorst's book.

Students identify interesting words from Shakespeare's plays and add them to a classroom vocabulary collection.

Students learn about sentences by listing verbs, nouns, and adjectives. They use word cards to create descriptive sentences and work in groups to create the longest sentences they can.

This lesson encourages students to immerse themselves in poetry as they share their original poems orally and digitally with published poets and peers nationwide.

Introduce students to the idea that movies and TV have their own language and grammar, which gives them special ways of telling their stories.

Imagine if vocabulary could come alive with the click of a button! Students create video posters to demonstrate knowledge of new economics vocabulary.

Students watch a sample of artistic video clips online and respond through creative writing while using the vocabulary words they are currently studying.

This minilesson encourages children to seek out and appropriately react to nutrition labels and to make healthy food choices, integrating science, math, health, and literacy.

Students compile a playlist of 10 songs representing a literary character and explain their choices based on the book's dialogue, plot, conflict, and resolution.

Students learn to use tricolons—a writer's technique of putting words and phrases into groups of threes—to add rhythm and power to their writing.

Students use various tools and features of digital readers to develop vocabulary, support comprehension, respond to text, improve fluency, and enhance the reading experience.

Students produce a Readers Theatre performance to compete to be named the Reading Idol. Students vote on the final performances and record them as podcasts.