By exploring myths and truths surrounding Independence Day, students think critically about commonly believed stories regarding the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the Independence Day holiday.

Students are guided through the process of taking notes while reading factual information, then turning those notes into new sentences and paragraphs written in their own words.

Students create posters using images, text, and mathematical equations to represent a story problem.

Students create math stories by first drawing, then writing, and finally using math symbols to show addition or subtraction.

Students work in groups to create annotated book reviews with links to topics of interest related to their book.

Students work together to create classroom rules by brainstorming why they are at school and what they need while they are there.

Students analyze "choose your own adventure" stories and brainstorm to develop setting, characters, and plots for their own adventures stories and related Websites.

Students celebrate a novel they have read and get hands-on experience with technical writing by creating a board game based on the novel and writing the instructions for it.

This minilesson guides student in using the PQP technique—Praise–Question–Polish—to offer concrete and useful peer review feedback.

Students use a graphic organizer to analyze setting development in picture books. They then apply what they have learned to their own writing.

Students explore letter poems and experiment with writing letters as poems, using the placement of line breaks to enhance rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance.

Students read various poems and explore why lines are broken where they are and how they affect rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance in poetry.

Through a series of picture book read-alouds, students engage in critical discussion of complex issues of race, class, and gender.

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

Watch Mother Goose work her magic! This lesson uses nursery rhymes to help emergent readers remember the letters and their sounds and identify word chunks.

Kindergartners share their knowledge of letters and sounds in a large group setting, giving teachers an assessment opportunity. Each student contributes a page to make a repetitive classroom book.

This lesson describes how small groups of students can plan meetings to discuss what they've read in a "just for fun" book club they've organized—and that they control.

This lesson challenges students' views of Native Americans as a vanished people by asking them to compare their prior knowledge with information they gather while reading about contemporary Native Americans.

Working in small groups, students compose found and parallel poems based on a descriptive passage they have chosen from a piece of literature they are reading.