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.

Students participate in shared reading, choral reading, and readers theater, using books by Bill Martin, Jr. Repeated readings and literary performances help students with their reading accuracy, expression, and rate.

In this author study, students listen to and discuss four books by Leo Lionni. They identify similarities and differences in the stories and then compare two stories of their choice.

Students discuss and chart letter elements and write their own letters to adults at school, reinforcing letter-writing skills beyond the classroom lesson.

Students will square up a conflict and learn how to effectively resolve any issues using a Solution Square.

Students will love unwrapping this lesson about before, during, and after reading activities based on Margaree King Mitchell's book, Grandaddy's Gift.

Students will be singing the blues in this lesson in which they identify themes from "The Gift of the Magi" and write and present blues poetry based on those themes.

A big green monster helps students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills through choral reading, literacy center activities, and writing stories.

"2-4-6-8, students will be spelling great" in this lesson that teaches the y rule for adding suffixes through cheering the spelling of words aloud, word sorts, and writing stories.

What does the world look like through a javelina's eyes? Students become javelinas in this lesson when they analyze a character and write from his or her perspective.

The interactive read-aloud in this lesson helps students to identify and classify the three verb types—action, state-of-being or linking, and helping verbs.

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.

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 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.

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.