Students rework their forgotten/abandoned drafts by cutting and covering up selected words. By creatively manipulating text, they explore portal writing, a strategy for envisioning a new story or story direction.
Cut up, Cover up, and Come Away with Ideas for Writing!
Note Writing in the Primary Classroom
This lesson provides a wealth of ideas for using notes in the classroom to promote authentic writing among children.
The Passion of Punctuation
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).
Literature Response in Primary Classrooms
This step-by-step literature response template for use with read-alouds asks students to use drawing and writing to respond to increasingly-complex prompts which address literary elements as well as personal connections.
Family Message Journals Teach Many Purposes for Writing
This lesson encourages children to explore authentic reasons for writing by writing messages to their family in a family message journal.
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.
Language Learners in the English Classroom
This book provides practical, research-based strategies that can help secondary-level English language learners meet the challenges of both language and content learning.
Q is for Duck: Using Alphabet Books With Struggling Writers
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.
Sentence Quest: Using Parts of Speech to Write Descriptive Sentences
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.
Name Talk: Exploring Letter-Sound Knowledge in the Primary Classroom
Students demonstrate their letter/sound knowledge by working with name cards and sharing observations about their classmates' names, giving teachers an opportunity to assess knowledge in a meaningful context.
When I Was Young In...A Literature to Language Experience
Past meets present in this lesson in which students practice verb tense when they write personal short stories that they then publish in a flip book.
The Magnetism of Language: Parts of Speech, Poetry, and Word Play
What wonderful ways words work! The parts of speech are the highlight of this lesson in which students identify parts of speech in a nonsensical poem and then create their own wild and wacky rhymes.
Let's Read It Again: Comprehension Strategies for English-Language Learners
Help Spanish-speaking English-language learners unlock the mysteries of their new language by using a bilingual book to recognize unfamiliar words and construct meaning from the text.
Whole-to-Parts Phonics Instruction: Teaching Letter-Sound Correspondences
Students will find that learning onset and rime is a handy skill when they read the Jack and Jill rhyme.
Getting the ig in Pig: Helping Children Discover Onset and Rime
Students will need their language-building hard hats as they construct words using onset and rime, building vocabulary and phonics comprehension.