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.
Media Literacy: Examining the World of Television Teens
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.
Great American Inventors: Using Nonfiction to Learn About Technology Inventions
Who are the people behind the world's greatest inventions? Students read biographies of a terrific trio of American inventors and create presentations that highlight how their inventions from the past impacted the future.
Bingo! Using Environmental Print to Practice Reading
The game Bingo is transformed in this lesson in which students use symbols and images to make connections to environmental print through the use of personalized Bingo cards.
My Family Traditions: A Class Book and a Potluck Lunch
After analyzing Family Pictures/Cuadros de Familia by Carmen Lomas Garza, students create a class book with artwork and information about their ancestry, traditions, and recipes, followed by a potluck lunch.
Play Ball! Encouraging Critical Thinking Through Baseball Questions
Cooperation and critical thinking are the name of the game as students use baseball facts they find online to create trivia questions for a class Jeopardy game.
Storytelling in the Social Studies Classroom
People make the past come alive as students research and then share stories about famous Americans who promoted democratic ideals.
A Race With Grace: Sports Poetry in Motion
In this lesson, athletics, aesthetics, and poetics intersect in new ways as developing literacy learners experiment together with the forms of language.
Multipurpose Poetry: Introducing Science Concepts and Increasing Fluency
Creepy crawlers, hoppers, and fliers are the focus of this lesson in which students chorally read poems about insects and use the Internet to locate facts about their assigned insects.
Using Folk Tales: Vowel Influences on the Letter G
Gentle, gigantic, gracefuldo 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.
Cosmic Oranges: Observation and Inquiry Through Descriptive Writing and Art
Students will eat up this lesson about oranges as they practice the skills that help them investigate and make detailed observations for descriptive purposes.
Exploring Compare and Contrast Structure in Expository Texts
Students build their understanding of the terms compare and contrast by participating in class discussions, using Internet resources, working collaboratively, and by visually representing information in a Venn diagram.
Flying to Freedom: Tar Beach and The People Could Fly
Students look to the past and use historical context to compare and contrast two characters from folktales.
Dynamic Duo Text Talks: Examining the Content of Internet Sites
An Observation and Inquiry Sheet guides students as they analyze and compare their reactions to the value, engagement, and credibility of three websites related to Anne Frank and the Holocaust.
Exploring How Section Headings Support Understanding of Expository Texts
Nonfiction may be dull for some students, but this lesson helps them focus on the main ideas. Through awareness of section headings, students learn to sort and categorize main concepts.
The Frog Beyond the Fairy Tale Character: Searching Informational Texts
Frogs often appear as the main character in fiction stories, but what do students really know about frogs? Students find out in this lesson in which they research real-life frogs.
Hero's Journey
Students can use this tool to learn about the elements of the hero's journey, analyze a text that follows the hero's journey pattern, or start creating a hero story of their own.