A picture is worth a thousand words as students are guided in viewing wordless picture books and responding to four different types of questions about the images they see.
Applying Question-Answer Relationships to Pictures
Using Personal Connections to Build an Understanding of Emotions
What makes you happy? What makes you sad? Connecting words to feelings enriches vocabulary and helps with concept development.
Timelines and Texts: Motivating Students to Read Nonfiction
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.
Artistic Elements: Exploring Art Through Descriptive Writing
Paint a vivid picture in your reader's mind with good descriptive writing! Artwork provides the perfect starting point for practicing descriptive writing that conveys color, shape, line, and mood.
Internalization of Vocabulary Through the Use of a Word Map
Students practice with words and develop both definitional and contextual knowledge through two agents—purposeful sequencing of steps and collaboration with peers.
Learning Vocabulary Down By the Bay
Students sing a popular children's song, follow along with a picture book that contains the lyrics and illustrations, and then participate in activities to reinforce learning of the vocabulary words.
Choosing, Chatting, and Collecting: Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy
Students identify interesting words from Shakespeare's plays and add them to a classroom vocabulary collection.
Creative Communication Frames: Discovering Similarities between Writing and Art
Graphic organizers assist the development of comparative vocabulary and generate discussions of analogy and metaphor in art as students go on a real or virtual tour of an art gallery.
Show What You Know: Read, Write and Solve Math Problems
Informational texts, iPads, and interactive games, oh, my! Help students journey through multimodal texts to identify and solve real-world mathematics problems using writing and apps.
Reading Movies and TV: Learning the "Language" of Moving-Image Texts
Introduce students to the idea that movies and TV have their own language and grammar, which gives them special ways of telling their stories.
Bringing Economic Vocabulary to Life Through Video Posters
Imagine if vocabulary could come alive with the click of a button! Students create video posters to demonstrate knowledge of new economics vocabulary.
Finding Solutions to Food Waste: Persuasion in a Digital World
Using various reading strategies and resources, students explore the issue of food waste. They also create persuasive arguments and blog posts examining this topic.
Tell Me Your Story: Video-Inspired Vocabulary Writing
Students watch a sample of artistic video clips online and respond through creative writing while using the vocabulary words they are currently studying.
Inspire Healthful Reading Using Unconventional Texts
This minilesson encourages children to seek out and appropriately react to nutrition labels and to make healthy food choices, integrating science, math, health, and literacy.
Resumes and Cover Letters for High School Students
High school students are taught how to use resumes and cover letters to highlight their skills and make them stand out, whether applying to college or for a job.
Using Story Innovation to Teach Fluency, Vocabulary, and Structure
An instructional strategy called story innovation teaches students fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, and story structure. This unique strategy can be adapted for many purposes.
Digital Word Detectives: Building Vocabulary With e-Book Readers
Students in grades 2-6 use digital dictionaries and other e-book tools to learn new vocabulary as they read e-books on digital reading devices.
Loaded Words: Vocabulary That Packs a Punch in Persuasive Writing
In this minilesson, students practice identifying and purposefully using vocabulary in persuasive writing that is intended to have an emotional impact on the reader.
A Portrait of Our World: Making Connections and Developing Comprehension
Students engage in carousel walks, character analyses, global explorations, and genre studies while using valuable language arts strategies to build higher-level comprehension skills.
Engineering the Perfect Poem by Using the Vocabulary of STEM
Students research engineering careers and create poetry to understand the vocabulary of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).