Students in grades 4 and 5 discuss inferential comprehension and visualization as they use a think-aloud questioning strategy to develop a deeper understanding of a historical novel.

Students often believe that fiction writers make everything up, seldom realizing how research worms its way into entertaining writing. In this lesson, students read Diary of a Worm to find out how fact merges with fiction.

Poetry and politics combine in this lesson where students write a free verse poem in the voice of Cesar Chavez.

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.

This lesson encourages students in grades 4 and 5 to think critically and write persuasively by focusing on preparing, presenting, and evaluating mock campaign speeches.

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.

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 read biographies and explore websites of selected American authors and then role-play as the authors.

Students read a work of realistic fiction about bullying and gain understanding through writing, Readers Theatre, and discussion.

Imagination and application are key to this tall tale lesson in which students take what they know about tall tales to spin a yarn of their own.

"That's my position and I'm sticking to it!" After reading about the Korean War, students will take a position in response to an open-ended question, support their position, and evaluate that support.

Students take a walk on the wild side when they develop an understanding of nonfiction texts with hands-on experiences and intense analysis.

Did Paul Bunyan gouge out the Grand Canyon before or after he dug the Great Lakes? Students create a life-sized timeline showing the sequence of events in this tall tale.

What is it like to have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? Students find out in this lesson in which they "become" the characters in Judith Viorst's book.

Students identify interesting words from Shakespeare's plays and add them to a classroom vocabulary collection.

Using the guiding question, "What is reading?" students interact with a variety of texts as they uncover the skills necessary to interact with texts and develop a definition of reading.

This lesson encourages students to immerse themselves in poetry as they share their original poems orally and digitally with published poets and peers nationwide.

Introduce students to the idea that movies and TV have their own language and grammar, which gives them special ways of telling their stories.