Students analyze characterization by creating their own superheroes or super-villains, complete with related gadgets and settings.

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.

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.

Students practice writing detailed, sensory-rich descriptions by framing a small piece of nature and freewriting about it. From this minilesson, students can develop a variety of types of writing.

Students use illustrations from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a guide to write mysteries and then present their stories to the class for students to discuss to which illustration each story corresponds.

After critiquing a list of conventions for the genre, students read, view, or listen to a classic mystery, and then produce a mystery of their own, reflecting on the purposeful ways in which they adhered to or altered the genre conventions.

Using different writing/drawing materials (e.g., markers, color pencils, pastels, etc.), students learn how to communicate different moods and/or feelings to support their written ideas and how authors do the same through their work.

Students are often asked to perform speeches, but rarely do we require students to analyze speeches as carefully as we study works of literature. In this unit, students are required to identify the rhetorical strategies in a famous speech and the specific purpose for each chosen device. They will write an essay about its effectiveness and why it is still famous after all these years.

Groups of students read and discuss American folklore stories, each group reading a different story. Using a jigsaw strategy, the groups compare character traits and main plot points of the stories. A diverse selection of American folk tales is used for this lesson, which is adaptable to any text set.

In this lesson, students incorporate analyses of characters from The Crucible with examinations of original seventeenth-century portraits of Puritans to create a visual portrait of the character. The project culminates in a "Portrait Gallery Walk" where students present and defend their artwork.

In this lesson, students read Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night as a whole group as the teacher models a questioning strategy. In subsequent sessions, students practice the questioning strategy and reread for fluency.

Students study Chaucer's Canterbury Tales not just for its rich language, but also for the insights it provides into the Middle Ages. Using wikis, students collaborate to study both literature and history on their own terms. They create meaning and build information networks using tools Chaucer himself would have loved.

This lesson supports third-through-sixth grade students as they communicate story setting to their readers through the use of visual image prompts. Activities include individual and cooperative learning group work, as well as whole class discussion.

Students use social networking sites to trace the development of characters by assuming the persona of a character on the class Ning and sending a set number of tweets, or status updates.

Students imagine the possibilities afforded by text messaging technology in The Catcher in the Rye; They compare and contrast major forms of communication, select points in the novel to represent with text messages, and share and discuss their creative work.

Students work in small groups to examine Margaret Atwood's use of and observations about language in The Handmaid's Tale. Through this activity, students discover and articulate overarching thematic trends in the book and then can extend their observations about official or political language to examples from their own world.

Using Beloved as a model of a work with multiple narrative perspectives, students use a visualizing activity and close reading to consider ways in which subjective values shape contradictory representations.

Students read a variety of picture books that contain elements of the hero's journey and use an online interactive tool to analyze the stories.