Writing gets personal when students interview family members in order to write a personal narrative about that person.

Vocabulary gumshoes use context clues and semantics to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.

Students circle their desks as they analyze their own participation within a small group discussion.

Students put their heads together in a poetry circle to learn and practice different forms of poetry.

What's in a narrative? Students find out in this lesson in which they explore four narrative elements—setting, characters, problem/solution, and plot, through purpose-driven read-alouds and independent reading.

Families are all about connections between people. In this lesson, students read three books about different families and make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections to those texts.

How do you read an image? Students find out in this lesson in which they "read" several images of the Boston Massacre to better understand the event and recognize effects of propaganda.

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.

Students use sets of words that share a spelling pattern to create a card game like "Go Fish" and then play the game in groups, helping them improve their spelling.

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 study common root words and affixes, improve their comprehension and spelling, and make a card game in which they form words with a prefix, root word, and suffix.

This lesson will be music to the students' ears when they hear that they get to read song lyrics and compose original lyrics for a familiar song.

Lights, camera, action, and a bit of mystery! In this lesson, students use mystery props in a skit bag to create and perform in short, impromptu skits.

Students learn about word families by reading Kevin Henkes's book Chrysanthemum, identifying words with certain vowel pair endings, and reading words with similar endings.

Seven blind mice—see how they spend each day of the week in this lesson that uses the book Seven Blind Mice to guide students through shared reading, writing, and listening activities.

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

The Word Wizard activities in this lesson transform phonics from drudgery into delight! Students manipulate letters to make different words.

Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.

After reading an engaging yet predictable text about a child looking for his cat, students use a similar format and high-frequency words to craft tales about their own lost pets.