It's raining cats and dogs! Students explore figurative language through read-alouds, teacher modeling, and student-centered activities, further developing their understanding of the literal versus the metaphorical translations of idioms.

A big green monster helps students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills through choral reading, literacy center activities, and writing stories.

Students write authentic newspaper stories, including learning about various aspects of newspapers, such as writing an article, online articles, newspaper reading habits, and layout and design techniques.

Students analyze a photograph, brainstorm words to describe the characters' senses and feelings, work in pairs to describe a character's experience, and create a poem using their ideas and similes.

In this lesson, students use both fiction and nonfiction texts, the Internet, and a K-W-L chart to learn about how animals survive the winter.

"2-4-6-8, students will be spelling great" in this lesson that teaches the y rule for adding suffixes through cheering the spelling of words aloud, word sorts, and writing stories.

Questions about weather clear up when students use what they learned from their books to create a presentation to share with the rest of the class.

What does the world look like through a javelina's eyes? Students become javelinas in this lesson when they analyze a character and write from his or her perspective.

Paper and pixels get compared in this lesson in which students compare both printed and online versions of a magazine.

Students will be crawling all over this assignment when they use illustrations and text to learn about life from a bug's point of view.

Students take a fresh look at the revision process and help one another polish their written work through a peer-editing strategy that is simple, systematic, and constructive.

Students participate in a scavenger hunt for shapes; reading, writing, and discussion of shapes encourage literacy and math skills.

Students tell their life stories in this lesson about autobiographies based on family photographs.

Students' responses to this lesson will be out of this world after they've researched astronomy to write poetry and compile a poetry book.

A is for zoo? Q is for duck? The alphabet as students know it is transformed when students create a class book that contains clever associations for each letter of the alphabet.

Students examine story elements through teacher read-alouds and independent reading and then use reader-response journals and graphic organizers to prepare for the creation of their own scary stories.

Interpreting art is a subjective process. In this lesson, students write written responses analyzing a work of art and use feedback from their peers to revise or confirm their initial responses.

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.

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.

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.