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.
Digital Reflections: Expressing Understanding of Content Through Photography
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.
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 Life/Your Life: A Look at Your Parents' Past
Past and present come together when students interview their parents and create a skit that compares their parents' experiences as middle schoolers with the students' own lives.
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.
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.
Can You Convince Me? Developing Persuasive Writing
Through a classroom game and resource handouts, students learn about the techniques used in persuasive oral arguments and apply them to independent persuasive writing activities.
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.
A Journal for Corduroy: Responding to Literature
Connect home and school, literature and life, as students take a storybook character home with them and take turns writing stories about his visit.
The Reading Performance: Understanding Fluency Through Oral Interpretation
Students discuss prosody, gain a new appreciation for literature intended for oral performance, and participate in activities that instill the value of technology in shaping their appreciation of literature.
Text Talk: Julius, the Baby of the World
Students are asked to "talk" with Kevin Henkes' Julius, the Baby of the World by using open-ended questions to help them interpret the language, plot, and characters of the story.
Poetry: A Feast to Form Fluent Readers
Students improve their reading fluency by selecting a poem online to perform in class.
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.
Profile Publisher
Students use the Profile Publisher to draft online social networking profiles, yearbook profiles, and newspaper or magazine profiles for themselves, other real or fictional characters.