Students analyze characterization by creating their own superheroes or super-villains, complete with related gadgets and settings.

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.

August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson invites students to ask a number of questions—big and small. Students learn how to create effective discussion questions and then put them to use in student-led discussions.

Students imagine the possibilities afforded by text messaging technology in The Catcher in the Rye; They compare and contrast major forms of communication, select points in the novel to represent with text messages, and share and discuss their creative work.

Students work in small groups to examine Margaret Atwood's use of and observations about language in The Handmaid's Tale. Through this activity, students discover and articulate overarching thematic trends in the book and then can extend their observations about official or political language to examples from their own world.

Students use fractured fairy tales to practice revision and editing as separate activities when they write their own versions of fairy tales.

Students stage a mock trial for a literary character, with groups of students acting as the prosecution, defense, and jury.

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.

Students capture scraps of information from a variety of Web resources and use them to create an electronic scrapbook. Emphasis is placed on evaluating and citing resources.

Students read Avi's Nothing But the Truth and examine the First Amendment and student rights, and then decide whether the rights of the novel's protagonist, Philip, are violated.

In this lesson, students connect to the oral tradition of epic storytellers by sharing their own oral tales of ghosts and goblins and monsters.

Tap students' desires to doodle and draw by having them create a Graffiti Wall, using graphics to discuss a piece of literature that has been read by the whole class.

This twist on readers theater has students prepare original news programs based on incidents in a recent reading, as they explore standard literary elements of character, conflict, resolution, and setting.

Students use A Tale of Two Cities to explore relationships, plot points, character traits, and background by writing text messages between characters within the novel.

In this alternative book report, students identify the elements of fiction in books they have read by creating glogs, interactive multimedia posters, and then share their glogs.

In this lesson students research Greek gods, heroes, and creatures and then share their findings through digital storytelling.

Students use the elements of persuasion for a specific audience to demonstrate their understanding of Richard Wright's accessible and engaging coming-of-age novel, Rite of Passage.

Writing professional reviews teaches students to understand audience, content, and publication guidelines. In this lesson, students put these into practice as professional writers critiquing, designing, and publishing reviews on Amazon.com.