The important thing about this lesson is… that it connects literature and science. The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown provides a model for original student poems about a content area topic. Web-based bookmarks guide students to appropriate sites on the topic, and a graphic organizer helps them focus their research.
Using Web-Based Bookmarks to Conduct Internet Research
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.
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.
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.
Word Mover
Word Mover allows children and teens to create "found poetry" by choosing from word banks and existing famous works; additionally, users can add new words to create a piece of poetry by moving/manipulating the text.
Word Matrix
Explore the similarities and differences among words typically considered synonyms with this tool that allows middle- and secondary-level students organize groups of words by connotation on one axis and by register on another.
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.
CD/DVD Cover Creator
The CD/DVD Cover Creator allows users to type and illustrate CD and DVD covers and related booklets for liner notes and other information. Students can use the tool to create covers for books, music, and films that they explored as well as to create covers for media they compose individually or as a class.
Postcard Creator
The Postcard Creator helps students learn to identify all the typical parts of a postcard, and then generate their own postcard messages by typing information into letter templates. After printing their texts, students can illustrate the front of their postcards in a variety of ways, including drawing, collage, and stickers.
Book Cover Creator
The Book Cover Creator is designed to allow users to type and illustrate front book covers, front and back covers, and full dust jackets. Students can use the tool to create new covers for books that they read as well as to create covers for books they write individually or as a class.
Flip Book
The Flip Book is designed to allow users to type and illustrate tabbed flip books up to ten pages long. Students and teachers can use the flip book for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating question and answer booklets.
Sharon Draper was born on this day in 1952.
Students read a book from one of Draper's trilogies and then meet to discuss their book with students have read the other two books.