Students use logos from everyday life to identify individual letters and then create their own captions for the images.
Stop Signs, McDonald's, and Cheerios: Writing With Environmental Print
My Life/Your Life: A Look at Your Parents' Past
Past and present come together when students interview their parents and create a skit that compares their parents' experiences as middle schoolers with the students' own lives.
Blast Off! Vocabulary Instruction Using a Virtual Moon Trip
3, 2, 1... Blast off! Students learn new vocabulary by taking a virtual field trip to the moon, read-alouds, creating a picture dictionary, and completing a final writing activity.
Play Ball! Encouraging Critical Thinking Through Baseball Questions
Cooperation and critical thinking are the name of the game as students use baseball facts they find online to create trivia questions for a class Jeopardy game.
Exploring Cause and Effect Using Expository Texts About Natural Disasters
Students explore the nature and structure of expository texts that focus on cause and effect and apply what they learned using graphic organizers and writing paragraphs to outline cause-and-effect relationships.
Using Web-Based Bookmarks to Conduct Internet Research
The important thing about this lesson is… that it connects literature and science. The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown provides a model for original student poems about a content area topic. Web-based bookmarks guide students to appropriate sites on the topic, and a graphic organizer helps them focus their research.
Using Folk Tales: Vowel Influences on the Letter G
Gentle, gigantic, gracefuldo these g words describe the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk? Students will explore the hard and soft g sounds by studying fairy tales and animals.
Student of the Day: Create Sound/Letter Understanding With Names
Name games make learning letters fun and interactive in this lesson where students get to know more about each other as they spell out their classmates' names.
Can You Convince Me? Developing Persuasive Writing
Through a classroom game and resource handouts, students learn about the techniques used in persuasive oral arguments and apply them to independent persuasive writing activities.
Word Recognition Strategies Using Nursery Rhymes
Whether you sing or recite familiar nursery rhymes in this standard lesson, students will learn how to create and categorize words that have similar endings.
Using a Word Journal to Create a Personal Dictionary
Students will be the definition of vocabulary experts as they use the skills they learn in this lesson to track, define, and ultimately master unfamiliar words.
Word Mover
Word Mover allows children and teens to create "found poetry" by choosing from word banks and existing famous works; additionally, users can add new words to create a piece of poetry by moving/manipulating the text.
Word Matrix
Explore the similarities and differences among words typically considered synonyms with this tool that allows middle- and secondary-level students organize groups of words by connotation on one axis and by register on another.
Hero's Journey
Students can use this tool to learn about the elements of the hero's journey, analyze a text that follows the hero's journey pattern, or start creating a hero story of their own.
Postcard Creator
The Postcard Creator helps students learn to identify all the typical parts of a postcard, and then generate their own postcard messages by typing information into letter templates. After printing their texts, students can illustrate the front of their postcards in a variety of ways, including drawing, collage, and stickers.
Book Cover Creator
The Book Cover Creator is designed to allow users to type and illustrate front book covers, front and back covers, and full dust jackets. Students can use the tool to create new covers for books that they read as well as to create covers for books they write individually or as a class.
Flip Book
The Flip Book is designed to allow users to type and illustrate tabbed flip books up to ten pages long. Students and teachers can use the flip book for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating question and answer booklets.
The Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children is announced today.
Students read and discuss an award-winning book before writing their own story that demonstrates compassion.
Author Matt de la Peña was born today.
Students use an essay by de la Peña as a model for writing their own literacy autobiography.
Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was born today.
Students examine the painting that inspired Sondheim's Pulitzer-prize winning musical and then create a story of their own based on image they choose.