David and Phyllis Whitin offer K–6 teachers a wealth of ideas for integrating literature and mathematics.
New Visions for Linking Literature and Mathematics
Designing Writing Assignments
Traci Gardner offers practical tips, starting points, and a companion website to help secondary and college teachers design effective writing assignments.
Writing at the Threshold: Featuring 56 Ways to Prepare High School and College Students to Think and Write at the College Level
This book offers both an eloquent philosophy of composition instruction and a useful set of classroom-tested teaching ideas distilled from the author's 28 years of teaching writing.
What Is "College-Level" Writing?
Just what defines "college-level" writing? This collection seeks to engage this essential question with care, patience, and pragmatism.
Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel
This collection of essays by classroom teachers demonstrates how to pair graphic novels with classic literature (including both canonical and YA lit).
Lesson Plans for Teaching Writing
This collection of lesson plans will help prepare high school and college students for college-level writing.
The Writing Workshop: Working through the Hard Parts (And They're All Hard Parts)
A practical, comprehensive, and illuminating guide for both new and experienced teachers that confronts the challenges of the writing workshop head-on.
Swish! Pow! Whack! Teaching Onomatopoeia Through Sports Poetry
Students explore poetry about sports, looking closely at the use of onomatopoeia. After viewing a segment of a sporting event, students create their own onomatopoeic sports poems.
The Ten-Minute Play: Encouraging Original Response to Challenging Texts
Students use both analytical and creative skills to adapt passages from a novel with significant internal dialogue and conflict, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, into a ten-minute play.
Persuading Readers with Endorsement Letters
Students explore the genre of commercial endorsements, establishing characteristics and requirements for the genre. Each student then composes an endorsement of a product, service, company, or industry.
The Importance of Titles: From Big Blank Space to Small Good Thing
After examining two sets of stories that author Raymond Carver renamed in revision, students write a reflective essay in which they defend their choice of a title for one them.
Color of Silence: Sensory Imagery in Pat Mora's Poem "Echoes"
Pat Mora's poem "Echoes" demonstrates that our senses are powerful tools for literary analysis and comprehension as students use their senses to discover new ways to read and write.
Having My Say: A Multigenre Autobiography Project
Students compose a multigenre paper, modeled after the Delany sister's autobiography, Having Our Say, that includes the autobiographical narrative essay as well as an informational nonfiction piece.
Writing Technical Instructions
Students walk through the process of creating technical instructions by analyzing existing instructions, choosing an audience, writing their own instructions, receiving user feedback, and then revising and publishing their instructions.
Polishing Preposition Skills through Poetry and Publication
Students deepen and refine their understanding of prepositions by reading Ruth Heller's Behind the Mask. They write preposition poetry and create a study guide using an online tool.
Analyzing and Comparing Medieval and Modern Ballads
Students explore the ballads genre by reading medieval ballads to deduce their characteristics, acting out the ballads, comparing medieval and modern ballads using Venn diagrams, and composing their own ballads.
Exploring Setting: Constructing Character, Point of View, Atmosphere, and Theme
Students read texts by Dybek, Dickens, Poe, and Morrison to explore how authors use language to create setting and, in turn, how setting constructs other elements in a literary work.
Ekphrasis: Using Art to Inspire Poetry
In this lesson, students explore ekphrasis—writing inspired by art. Students find pieces of art that inspire them and compose a booklet of poems about the pieces they have chosen.
Analyzing Grammar Pet Peeves
By analyzing Dear Abby's "rant" about bad grammar usage, students become aware that attitudes about race, social class, moral and ethical character, and "proper" language use are intertwined.
Beyond "What I Did on Vacation": Exploring the Genre of Travel Writing
After reading and analyzing short examples of travel writing and discussing conventions of the genre, students write their own travel articles.