Students get the big picture of the Middle East when they read and analyze Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis.

Students won't miss a beat in this musical lesson that combines listening with personal response on a postcard.

The classroom becomes a stage in this interactive lesson in which students sing, act, and design comic strips to learn the meanings and spellings of common homophones.

It's easy to make spelling fun. Using a variety of activities from sorting to using words in context will help deepen students' understanding of word patterns.

A big green monster helps students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills through choral reading, literacy center activities, and writing stories.

Students write authentic newspaper stories, including learning about various aspects of newspapers, such as writing an article, online articles, newspaper reading habits, and layout and design techniques.

Through interactive writing, students work together and then independently to create invitation letters for a group of their peers and their families.

"2-4-6-8, students will be spelling great" in this lesson that teaches the y rule for adding suffixes through cheering the spelling of words aloud, word sorts, and writing stories.

Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy of previewing.

Paper and pixels get compared in this lesson in which students compare both printed and online versions of a magazine.

Students are introduced to short-vowel word families and learn to sort words alone and with a partner using the Word Family Sort activity.

Students often believe that fiction writers make everything up, seldom realizing how research worms its way into entertaining writing. In this lesson, students read Diary of a Worm to find out how fact merges with fiction.

Students participate in a scavenger hunt for shapes; reading, writing, and discussion of shapes encourage literacy and math skills.

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.

Students explore the role of prefixes, as well as their origins and meanings, and examine how the understanding of prefixes can improve comprehension, decoding, and spelling.

In an effort to help motivate students to read nonfiction, students are challenged to use a timeline to help them name the year when certain products were invented.

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.

Students move from modeled to independent comprehension of fiction stories by using texts by Jan Brett and interactive tools that demonstrate their comprehension.

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.