Students learn about the life and music of John Lennon, write a short story from their lives integrating lyrics from some of their favorite songs, and create a class book of stories.
Songs of Our Lives: Using Lyrics to Write Stories
Cut up, Cover up, and Come Away with Ideas for Writing!
Students rework their forgotten/abandoned drafts by cutting and covering up selected words. By creatively manipulating text, they explore portal writing, a strategy for envisioning a new story or story direction.
Entering History: Nikki Giovanni and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nikki Giovanni's poem "The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr." is paired with Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, taking students on a quest through time to the Civil Rights movement.
Growing Readers and Writers with Help from Mother Goose
Watch Mother Goose work her magic! This lesson uses nursery rhymes to help emergent readers remember the letters and their sounds and identify word chunks.
Stapleless Book
The Stapleless Book can be used for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating vocabulary booklets . . . the possibilities are endless!
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
Featuring descriptions and activities for fifty exceptional titles, Mary Jo Fresch and Peggy Harkins offer a wealth of ideas for harnessing the power of picture books to improve reading and writing in the content areas.
Reading on the Go
In this Strategy Guide, learn how to prepare yourself and your students for reading and note-taking in mobile environments.
Performing Poetry
Performing poetry incorporates oral reading, literature, and the performing arts. This strategy can benefit content area readers, English language learners, or learners with special needs.
Let's Read It Again: Comprehension Strategies for English-Language Learners
Help Spanish-speaking English-language learners unlock the mysteries of their new language by using a bilingual book to recognize unfamiliar words and construct meaning from the text.
Poetry Portfolios: Using Poetry to Teach Reading
Teach your students about sentence structure, rhyming words, sight words, vocabulary, and print concepts using a weekly poem.
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.
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.
Poetry: A Feast to Form Fluent Readers
Students improve their reading fluency by selecting a poem online to perform in class.
Word Recognition Strategies Using Nursery Rhymes
Whether you sing or recite familiar nursery rhymes in this standard lesson, students will learn how to create and categorize words that have similar endings.
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.
Today is World Read Aloud Day.
Students celebrate the power of words by reading aloud to their classmates and spreading the word of global literacy to their friends and family.
Poet and author Pat Mora was born on this day in 1942.
Students study and write extended metaphors through the use of Pat Mora's book.
Celebrate National Library Week!
Students learn more about libraries as part of National Library Week.
Today, the American Library Association announces its annual book award winners.
Students research different awards given by the ALA and do an activity based on one of the awards.
Let's Go On A Poetry Walk!
The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and you're surrounded by brilliant shades of green! Observe and collect sensory images from nature and use the sights, sounds, smells, and textures to create original nature poetry.