Y'all set down a spell and learn ‘bout dialects!" In other words, your students will use The Color Purple to explore dialect and how it reveals information about the characters.

The interactive read-aloud in this lesson helps students to identify and classify the three verb types—action, state-of-being or linking, and helping verbs.

Students often believe that fiction writers make everything up, seldom realizing how research worms its way into entertaining writing. In this lesson, students read Diary of a Worm to find out how fact merges with fiction.

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.

Interpreting art is a subjective process. In this lesson, students write written responses analyzing a work of art and use feedback from their peers to revise or confirm their initial responses.

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 biographies and explore websites of selected American authors and then role-play as the authors.

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

What makes you happy? What makes you sad? Connecting words to feelings enriches vocabulary and helps with concept development.

"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.

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

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 reflect on their school year, creating a digital scrapbook consisting of images and text to present to their school community.

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.