Students compare the traits fact and fiction by using a Venn diagram to compare fiction and nonfiction books about Native Americans.

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.

Students participate in a scavenger hunt for shapes; reading, writing, and discussion of shapes encourage literacy and math skills.

Students tell their life stories in this lesson about autobiographies based on family photographs.

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.

Students learn about the process of questioning and using webs to organize information during reading and then practice writing factual and inferential questions.

Interpreting art is a subjective process. In this lesson, students write written responses analyzing a work of art and use feedback from their peers to revise or confirm their initial responses.

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 explore the role of prefixes, as well as their origins and meanings, and examine how the understanding of prefixes can improve comprehension, decoding, and spelling.

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.

Students learn how to effectively deal with bullying by participating in literature response groups and writing about when they experienced a similar situation or emotion as a fictional character.

A picture is worth a thousand words as students are guided in viewing wordless picture books and responding to four different types of questions about the images they see.

"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.

Where did the stars come from? What makes lightning and thunder? Pourquoi tales are narratives developed by various cultures around the world to explain natural phenomena. Students study three tales and learn about their cultures of origin, then work cooperatively to write and present an original pourquoi tale.

In an effort to help motivate students to read nonfiction, students are challenged to use a timeline to help them name the year when certain products were invented.

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.

Students practice with words and develop both definitional and contextual knowledge through two agents—purposeful sequencing of steps and collaboration with peers.

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