Like Junie B. Jones, students will be saying "Wait till you hear this" after listening to a Junie B. story and creating mystery boxes to help retell the story.
Junie B. Jones Introduces Literacy Mystery Boxes
Behind the Masks: Exploring Culture Through Art and Poetry
Students research mask-making from various cultures, highlight the masks' connections to cultural practices, compose poetry to reveal their understanding, analyze their own culture, and create personal masks and poetry.
A High-Interest Novel Helps Struggling Readers Confront Bullying in Schools
Students read a work of realistic fiction about bullying and gain understanding through writing, Readers Theatre, and discussion.
A Bad Case of Bullying: Using Literature Response Groups
Students learn how to effectively deal with bullying by participating in literature response groups and writing about when they experienced a similar situation or emotion as a fictional character.
Thundering Tall Tales: Using Read-Aloud as a Springboard to Writing
Imagination and application are key to this tall tale lesson in which students take what they know about tall tales to spin a yarn of their own.
Developing Students' Critical Thinking Skills Through Whole-Class Dialogue
"That's my position and I'm sticking to it!" After reading about the Korean War, students will take a position in response to an open-ended question, support their position, and evaluate that support.
Sequencing: A Strategy to Succeed at Reading Comprehension
Did Paul Bunyan gouge out the Grand Canyon before or after he dug the Great Lakes? Students create a life-sized timeline showing the sequence of events in this tall tale.
Writing Workshop: Helping Writers Choose and Focus on a Topic
Students engage in writing workshop, using a timeline to focus in on and write about a specific event.
Demonstrating Comprehension Through Journal Writing
Students demonstrate comprehension by responding to open-ended questions based on the Newbery Honor book Mr. Popper's Penguins, and then draw from the text and their personal experiences to create journals.
Exploring the Subtext Strategy: Thinking Beyond the Text
What is it like to have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? Students find out in this lesson in which they "become" the characters in Judith Viorst's book.
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.
Poetry Plus! Creating 21st Century Poems with Web Tools
This lesson encourages students to immerse themselves in poetry as they share their original poems orally and digitally with published poets and peers nationwide.
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.
Blogging in the Primary Grades? Yes, Indeed!
Give students an authentic reason to read and write by researching blogs written by their peers around the world and then writing their own.
Create a Great Future: STEM Career Research Using Close Reading
What if students could see the relevance of their school curriculum to real-world, interesting, STEM-related careers? Let's help them create a great future!
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.
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.
The Houdini Box: What Did Houdini Hide? Writing Creative Endings
Students are encouraged to understand a book that the teacher reads aloud to create a new ending for it using the writing process.