Imagination and illustration are the key in this lesson in which students read and create their own greeting cards.
Using Greeting Cards to Motivate Students and Enhance Literacy Skills
BioBags: Linking Literature and Life
Students create BioBags, a collection of texts that mark special times in their lives. BioBags provide a way for students to share a variety of events and texts.
Blogging With Photovoice: Sharing Pictures in an Integrated Classroom
Make the most of your students' diverse ability levels and experience with a prewriting activity in which they describe an abstract idea using blogging and photographs that they have taken.
The Magnetism of Language: Parts of Speech, Poetry, and Word Play
What wonderful ways words work! The parts of speech are the highlight of this lesson in which students identify parts of speech in a nonsensical poem and then create their own wild and wacky rhymes.
Shared Experiences, Individual Impressions: Buddies Create PowerPoint Stories
Stories and snapshots of school-related experiences are the perfect sources of inspiration for students as they create PowerPoint presentations with the help of an older student.
Comparing a Literary Work to Its Film Interpretation
Students will really get into the swing of things as they analyze the text and film versions of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Pit and the Pendulum."
Crit Lit for Kids: From Critical Consciousness to Service Learning
Students take their ideas from the classroom page to the community pavement when they participate in a service-learning project based on their multimedia presentations.
Writers' Workshop: The Biographical Sketch
Students use the faces and places they learn about in their research to write a biography about a contemporary or historical figure.
Reading and Writing About Pollution to Understand Cause and Effect
Students get to write a whale of a tale when they complete a graphic organizer sequencing the journey of a mountain fish to a polluted waterway.
Guided Comprehension in Action: Teaching Summarizing With the Bio-Cube
Students learn the ins and outs of writing biographies by researching a contemporary or historical figure and writing a summary.
Empowered Fiction Writers: Generating and Organizing Ideas for Story Writing
Do their minds go blank when they confront a blank piece of paper? Speedwriting can help students get started on writing and come up with topics to write about. They can then incorporate their key ideas and phrases into a narrative with the help of a graphic story organizer.
Developing Story Structure With Paper-Bag Skits
Lights, camera, action, and a bit of mystery! In this lesson, students use mystery props in a skit bag to create and perform in short, impromptu skits.
Get Cooking With Words! Creating a Recipe Using Procedural Writing
Students participate in read-alouds of books that exemplify effective word choice, explore how to choose words to best communicate an idea, and then write explicit instructions for a recipe.
This is My Story: Encouraging Students to Use a Unique Voice
What did the wolf think of Red Riding Hood? Once Upon a Fairy Tale offers his side of the story and more, providing vivid examples of how voice enlivens narrative. After comparing versions of the story, students apply the concept of voice to Fractured Fairy Tales and other writing activities.
Zines for Kids: Multigenre Texts About Media Icons
Special edition! Students use ReadWriteThink tools to create magazines about prominent figures using a variety of writing genres and styles.
Writing a Movie: Summarizing and Rereading a Film Script
Lights! Camera! Action! In this lesson, students view a scene with no dialogue from E.T., write a script for that scene, and perform a dramatic reading while the scene plays.
Learning Centers: From Shared to Independent Practice
Seven blind mice—see how they spend each day of the week in this lesson that uses the book Seven Blind Mice to guide students through shared reading, writing, and listening activities.
Phonics Through Literature: Learning About the Letter M
Students learn about phonics by focusing on the letter m and participating in an integrated array of activities, including reading, writing, mathematics, music, art, and technology.
E-pals Around the World
With e-pals, students develop real-life writing and social experiences, learn the format of a friendly letter and parts of an e-mail message, and discover other cultures, languages, and geographic areas.
Heroes Around Us
Students select, read about, and report on a hero and then identify how their hero matches certain criteria and characteristics. Hero reports are then compiled into a class book.