Teach your students about sentence structure, rhyming words, sight words, vocabulary, and print concepts using a weekly poem.
Poetry Portfolios: Using Poetry to Teach Reading
Word Wizards: Students Making Words
The Word Wizard activities in this lesson transform phonics from drudgery into delight! Students manipulate letters to make different words.
Lights, Camera, Action: Interviewing a Book Character
Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.
Using a Predictable Text to Teach High-Frequency Words
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.
Multimedia Responses to Content Area Topics Using Fact-"Faction"-Fiction
Students climb into the mind of a spider in this lesson that asks them to compose a spider diary using spider facts, fiction, and "faction"fiction that sounds like fact.
Gingerbread Phonics
"Run, run, as fast as you can." Students use this refrain from The Gingerbread Man to learn letter-sound correspondence. Students use their new skills to write an online story.
The Big, Bad Wolf...Is This a Fact?
Reading is revamped in this lesson in which students use a multimedia approach to study the books by Seymour Simon.
Critical Media Literacy: Commercial Advertising
By looking at advertising and mass media critically, students begin to understand how the media oppresses certain groups, convinces people to purchase certain products, and influences culture.
Critical Media Literacy: TV Programs
By critically analyzing popular television programs, students develop an awareness of the messages that are portrayed through the media.
The Two Voices of the ow Spelling Pattern
Variable vowels are the focus of this lesson; students use nursery rhymes and ow to study how vowels can change their sounds according to different spelling patterns.
Protecting Our Precious Planet: Sharing the Message of Earth Day
Students discover that they can make a world of difference when they participate in the online Earth Day bag program.
Pairing Fiction With Poetry and Performance
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.
A Schema-Building Study With Patricia Polacco
Students use the Semantic Impressions and Possible Sentences strategies to write about Patricia Polacco's books Chicken Sunday and Rechenka's Egg, complete a character study, and write using a WebQuest.
Is Superman Really All That Super? Critically Exploring Superheroes
What makes a superhero super? By comparing popular culture superheroes with heroic characters in children's literature, students learn to think critically about character traits, and consider how cultural perspectives influence the kinds of heroes we choose.
Digital Reflections: Expressing Understanding of Content Through Photography
Striking images can leave lasting impressions on viewers. In this lesson, students make textselfworld connections to a nature- or science-related topic as they collaboratively design a multimedia presentation.
A-Z: Learning About the Alphabet Book Genre
Students increase their understanding of alphabet books by participating in a variety of reading and writing activities.
Media Literacy: Examining the World of Television Teens
Pop culture and the classroom collide in this lesson when students go behind the scenes to analyze a television series for characterization to use in an original television show proposal.
Slipping, Sliding, Tumbling: Reinforcing Cause and Effect Through Diamante Poems
Writing, revising, and publishing are just a few of the tasks students will complete in order to take their cause-and-effect diamante poems from an idea to a reality.
Music and Me: Visual Representations of Lyrics to Popular Music
Students will whistle while they work on this lesson, creating a photomontage movie of their interpretation of a favorite song's lyrics that will end everyone's day on a high note.
Sharing Favorite Books Using Interactive Character Trading Cards
Using selected characters from a text of their choice, students put their literary analysis skills to work by creating fictional character trading cards.