Students compare and analyze novels and the movies adapted from them. They design new DVD covers and a related insert for the movies, reflecting their response to the movie version.
Cover to Cover: Comparing Books to Movies
Students as Creators: Exploring Multimedia
Students are introduced to the genre of multimedia presentations through a review and analysis of online presentations. They then apply what they have learned to create their own multimedia presentations.
Gaining Background for the Graphic Novel Persepolis: A WebQuest on Iran
To prepare students for reading the graphic novel Persepolis, this lesson uses a WebQuest to focus students' research on finding reliable information about Iran before and during the Islamic Revolution.
It's My Life: Multimodal Autobiography Project
Students express themselves verbally, visually, and musically by creating multimodal autobiographies, exchanging ideas with other students and sharing important events in their lives through PowerPoint presentations.
Connecting Past and Present: A Local Research Project
In this unit, students become active archivists, gathering photos, artifacts, and stories for a museum exhibit that highlights one decade in their school's history.
The Children's Picture Book Project
In this lesson students evaluate published children's picture storybooks. Students then plan, write, illustrate, and publish their own children's picture books.
Love of War in Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story"
Students explore the theme of love of war through texts on camaraderie among soldiers. They then compose a visual collage depicting their beliefs about the relationship between love and war.
Assessing Cultural Relevance: Exploring Personal Connections to a Text
As a class, students evaluate a nonfiction or realistic fiction text for its cultural relevance to themselves personally and as a group.
Making It Visual for ELL Students: Teaching History Using Maus
Spark the engagement of English-language learners or reluctant readers with the graphic novel Maus. The visual information provided by the genre serves as a support for reading and critical engagement.
Creating a Persuasive Podcast
Students learn how to get their voice out on the web when they research issues important to them and compose a persuasive podcast to post online.
BOOKMATCH: Scaffolding Independent Book Selection
This lesson will be turning heads and pages as students learn how to choose appropriate books for independent reading exercises and later evaluate their choices.
Learning Clubs: Motivating Middle School Readers and Writers
Students participate in learning clubs, select content area topics, and draw on textsincluding websites, printed material, video, and musicto investigate their topics, and share their learning using similar media.
Recording Readers Theatre: Developing Comprehension and Fluency With Audio Texts
Students investigate audio texts of mystery stories, evaluate them in terms of both literary and audio qualities, and create Readers Theatre scripts, which they use to record their own podcasts.
I Remember That Book: Rereading as a Critical Investigation
Curl up with a good book againor not. In this lesson, students brainstorm why they reread some books, while passing up others, and write their reflections in an essay.
Earth Verse: Using Science in Poetry
Students shape up their reading, writing, and listening skills in this lesson by creating original diamante, acrostic, and shape poems about science.
Critical Literacy in Action: Multimodal Texts on Global Warming
Students will really warm up to this lesson about global warming as they study multimedia materials and use a variety of comprehension strategies.
Thoughtshots Can Bring Your Characters to Life!
Students will walk a mile in the shoes of Solomon Singer as they learn how to use flashbacks, flash-aheads, and internal dialogue to develop realistic characters.
Solving the Math Curse: Reading and Writing Math Word Problems
Students' reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills add up as they decipher word problems and use what they've learned to solve a crossword puzzle.
Plotting a Plan to Improve Writing: Using Plot Scaffolds
Students really get into character in this lesson as they act out the parts of a script and analyze character motivations and dialogue.
Descriptive Video: Using Media Technology to Enhance Writing
Students will have a roaring good time when they watch a scene from The Lion King as a way to compare standard and described programming media.