Students first analyze Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," then use Whitman's poem as a model as they create their own list poems.
Walt Whitman as a Model Poet: "I Hear My School Singing"
Cooking Up Descriptive Language: Designing Restaurant Menus
Students explore the menu genre by analyzing existing menus from local restaurants. They review adjectives and descriptive writing and then work in groups to create their own custom menus.
Choosing the Best Verb: An Active and Passive Voice Minilesson
Students explore how active and passive voices are appropriate to different audiences. They examine online resources, and then draw conclusions about verb use, which they apply to their own writing.
Every Punctuation Mark Matters: A Minilesson on Semicolons
Students analyze stylistic choices and grammar use in authentic writing, focusing on the use of the semicolon in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
Avoiding Sexist Language by Using Gender-Fair Pronouns
Students engage in a brief writing assignment that concretely illustrates how language and gender stereotyping interact causally.
Breaking the Rules with Sentence Fragments
Though teachers usually caution students against using sentence fragments, Edgar Schuster's work demonstrates that professional writers often use fragments effectively. This lesson helps students understand that there are reasons that they can and should use sentence fragments to become effective writers.
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).
Style-Shifting: Examining and Using Formal and Informal Language Styles
Students observe how language features vary when shifting from an informal to a formal style or vice versa. By engaging in style shifting in both speech and writing, students become aware of how we all change language styles depending on the contexts in which we are speaking or writing.
From Quantitative to Qualitative: Writing Descriptions of Data From Tables
Students develop quantitative reasoning and critical thinking by analyzing descriptions tables for content, language, and organization with a particular focus on verb tense selection, and then writing descriptions of tables themselves.
Charlotte is Wise, Patient, and Caring: Adjectives and Character Traits
Students find examples of adjectives in a shared reading. Then students "become" major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using powerful adjectives.
Audience, Purpose, and Language Use in Electronic Messages
Students explore using electronic messaging and Internet abbreviations for specific purposes and examine the importance of using a more formal style of writing based on their audience.
Inside or Outside? A Minilesson on Quotation Marks and More
Students often question whether a punctuation mark goes inside or outside the quotation marks, especially when writing dialogue. This lesson helps students identify the conventions and apply them to their text.
Character Clash: A Minilesson on Paragraphing and Dialogue
Students learn about paragraphing conventions in dialogue by revising their own writing.
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.
Alliteration in Headline Poems
Students will be introduced to the term alliteration and create a headline poem consisting of 25 words that contain at least three examples of alliteration.
Composing Cinquain Poems with Basic Parts of Speech
Reinforce student understanding of parts of speech through the analysis of sample cinquain poems followed by the creation of original cinquains.
Seasonal Haiku: Writing Poems to Celebrate Any Season
After listening to haiku poetry, students use seasonal descriptive words to write their own haiku, following the traditional format. They then publish their poems by mounting them on illustrated backgrounds.
Playing with Prepositions through Poetry
Students play with and explore prepositions during a whole group reading of Ruth Heller's Behind the Mask, and then by composing and publishing prepositional poems based on the book's style.
Found Poems/Parallel Poems
Students compose found and parallel poems based on a descriptive passage they have chosen from a piece of literature they are reading.
Flip-a-Chip
The Flip-a-Chip activity provides hands-on practice with affixes and roots, and also promotes comprehension through structural analysis and vocabulary in context.