After reading the book ¡Si, Se Puede!/Yes, We Can!: Janitor Strike in L.A., students learn about labor unions, strikes, and organizing for change. Students interview staff members in their school to learn about their daily work life, and write persuasive advocacy letters.

In this lesson, students will make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections after reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. After sharing and discussing connections, students choose and plan a project that makes a personal connection to the text.

This lesson engages children in using writing to their families as a persuasive tool to get what they want and need.

This lesson encourages children to explore authentic reasons for writing by writing messages to their family in a family message journal.

This lesson introduces Family Message Journals—a teacher-tested tool for encouraging family involvement and supporting writing to reflect and to learn.

Featuring descriptions and activities for fifty exceptional titles, Mary Jo Fresch and Peggy Harkins offer a wealth of ideas for harnessing the power of picture books to improve reading and writing in the content areas.

Through Prezi, a web application, students create "zooming" presentations for various purposes, such as presenting research, defending an opinion, or sharing a digital story.

Spark the engagement of English-language learners or reluctant readers with the graphic novel Maus. The visual information provided by the genre serves as a support for reading and critical engagement.

Students take a walk on the wild side when they research an animal and create a scavenger hunt activity for their classmates.

Students have the right to have fun in this lesson in which they create a PowerPoint presentation about civil rights and the Supreme Court.

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.

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.

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

Students will need their language-building hard hats as they construct words using onset and rime, building vocabulary and phonics comprehension.

Make connections across genres and across cultures to engage students in the study of literary voice and themes. Comprehension skills and vocabulary also come into play, especially for English language learners, as students read a novel and related poems, then write and perform original poems related to the novel.

Gentle, gigantic, graceful—do 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.