Students improve their reading fluency by selecting a poem online to perform in class.
Poetry: A Feast to Form Fluent Readers
Story Map
The Story Map interactive is designed to assist students in prewriting and postreading activities by focusing on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution.
Word Matrix
Explore the similarities and differences among words typically considered synonyms with this tool that allows middle- and secondary-level students organize groups of words by connotation on one axis and by register on another.
Profile Publisher
Students use the Profile Publisher to draft online social networking profiles, yearbook profiles, and newspaper or magazine profiles for themselves, other real or fictional characters.
CD/DVD Cover Creator
The CD/DVD Cover Creator allows users to type and illustrate CD and DVD covers and related booklets for liner notes and other information. Students can use the tool to create covers for books, music, and films that they explored as well as to create covers for media they compose individually or as a class.
Postcard Creator
The Postcard Creator helps students learn to identify all the typical parts of a postcard, and then generate their own postcard messages by typing information into letter templates. After printing their texts, students can illustrate the front of their postcards in a variety of ways, including drawing, collage, and stickers.
Book Cover Creator
The Book Cover Creator is designed to allow users to type and illustrate front book covers, front and back covers, and full dust jackets. Students can use the tool to create new covers for books that they read as well as to create covers for books they write individually or as a class.
Flip Book
The Flip Book is designed to allow users to type and illustrate tabbed flip books up to ten pages long. Students and teachers can use the flip book for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating question and answer booklets.
Today is World Read Aloud Day.
Students celebrate the power of words by reading aloud to their classmates and spreading the word of global literacy to their friends and family.
In 1931, Toni Morrison was born.
After retelling a familiar fable, students discover the differences in one of Morrison's retellings of a fable.
Celebrate El Día de Los Niños/El Día de Los Libros (Children's Day/Book Day)!
Using the Book Cover Creator, students write and share their own multilingual stories.
Seamus Heaney was born on this day in 1939.
Students focus on the figurative language in Heaney's poem, "Digging," and discuss the speaker's attitude, and how metaphor, simile, and image contribute to the poem.
Black Beauty author Anna Sewell was born in 1820.
Through Sewell's novel, students explore the cruelty to animals and extend the discussion to current events, eventually presenting the information.
The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850.
Students brainstorm the possible meaning of the title The Scarlet Letter and what its significance might be. The class' responses are returned to once the reading has begun to see how their definitions have changed.
Poet Robert Frost was born in 1874.
Students celebrate Frost's birthday by exploring his innovation in the sonnet form by studying poems and presenting them to the class.
Today is Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko's birthday.
Students revive elements of the oral tradition by writing about something funny that happened to them recently, sharing with classmates, and discussing the changes that occur during the retelling of the stories.
Beware the Ides of March!
Students discuss and categorize superstitions, define a superstition, and compare the similarities and difference between proverbs and superstitions.
Today is St. Patrick's Day.
St. Patrick's Day is celebrated by reading Irish folk tales and using the Story Cube tool to create a graphic organizer and see what characteristics are unique to Irish tales.
Poet Robert Burns was born in 1759.
Students read examples of traditional Scottish ballads and use this information to write and perform their own ballads.
Jacob Grimm, one of the Brothers Grimm, was born today.
Students compare different versions of the fairy tale Cinderella and then rewrite a lesser-known Grimm story and explain the changes they made.