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

Literature takes on a life of its own as students take a hands-on approach to exploring A Raisin in the Sun for cultural and historical context.

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

Students become online authors in this lesson in which they write and post a short story using wiki technology.

In this lesson, students learn to ask the right questions about the validity of surveys.

Students will learn to skim and scan to make sure they don't flounder when they're surfing the Internet for facts to help them complete riddles about the United States.

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

Students learn that what you read in books can really add up when they analyze literary texts for economic concepts.

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.

Students learn haiku write descriptive poems and share with the class.

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.

This assignment will go viral with students as they think about the meanings of words and images in public service announcements from YouTube before creating a PSA of their own.

Imagination and illustration are the key in this lesson in which students read and create their own greeting cards.

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.

Bookworms will enjoy the bytes they find in this lesson as they research and share information about online library services in places around the world.

Students will really get into the swing of things as they analyze the text and film versions of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Pit and the Pendulum."

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.

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.