What's that sound? Students participate in a Directed Listening–Thinking Activity (DLTA) using "The Tell-Tale Heart," make predictions, and respond in the form of an acrostic poem or comic strip.

Students' groans about studying poetry may disappear with this lesson in which students read poetry from various writers and use these poems to examine the sounds and sense of language.

Students won't miss a beat in this reading fluency lesson that combines music and poetry.

Writing gets personal when students interview family members in order to write a personal narrative about that person.

Students circle their desks as they analyze their own participation within a small group discussion.

Students put their heads together in a poetry circle to learn and practice different forms of poetry.

What's in a narrative? Students find out in this lesson in which they explore four narrative elements—setting, characters, problem/solution, and plot, through purpose-driven read-alouds and independent reading.

Families are all about connections between people. In this lesson, students read three books about different families and make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections to those texts.

This assignment will go viral with students as they think about the meanings of words and images in public service announcements from YouTube before creating a PSA of their own.

Students create BioBags, a collection of texts that mark special times in their lives. BioBags provide a way for students to share a variety of events and texts.

Make the most of your students' diverse ability levels and experience with a prewriting activity in which they describe an abstract idea using blogging and photographs that they have taken.

How do you read an image? Students find out in this lesson in which they "read" several images of the Boston Massacre to better understand the event and recognize effects of propaganda.

What wonderful ways words work! The parts of speech are the highlight of this lesson in which students identify parts of speech in a nonsensical poem and then create their own wild and wacky rhymes.

Stories and snapshots of school-related experiences are the perfect sources of inspiration for students as they create PowerPoint presentations with the help of an older student.

Students will really get into the swing of things as they analyze the text and film versions of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Pit and the Pendulum."

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.

Students take their ideas from the classroom page to the community pavement when they participate in a service-learning project based on their multimedia presentations.

This lesson will be music to the students' ears when they hear that they get to read song lyrics and compose original lyrics for a familiar song.

Lights, camera, action, and a bit of mystery! In this lesson, students use mystery props in a skit bag to create and perform in short, impromptu skits.