In this lesson, students connect to the oral tradition of epic storytellers by sharing their own oral tales of ghosts and goblins and monsters.

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).

After reading the book ¡Si, Se Puede!/Yes, We Can!: Janitor Strike in L.A., students learn about labor unions, strikes, and organizing for change. Students interview staff members in their school to learn about their daily work life, and write persuasive advocacy letters.

In this lesson, students will make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections after reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. After sharing and discussing connections, students choose and plan a project that makes a personal connection to the text.

In this lesson, students work with proverbs from home and from around the world, exploring how these maxims are tied to a culture's values and everyday experience.

This lesson encourages children to explore authentic reasons for writing by writing messages to their family in a family message journal.

Students complete a family survey and plan a website to share the responses, increasing their understanding and appreciation of their own families and cultures, and their classmates as well.

Spark the engagement of English-language learners or reluctant readers with the graphic novel Maus. The visual information provided by the genre serves as a support for reading and critical engagement.

Students take a walk on the wild side when they research an animal and create a scavenger hunt activity for their classmates.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Students will find that learning onset and rime is a handy skill when they read the Jack and Jill rhyme.

Students will need their language-building hard hats as they construct words using onset and rime, building vocabulary and phonics comprehension.