Students learn about the life and music of John Lennon, write a short story from their lives integrating lyrics from some of their favorite songs, and create a class book of stories.
Songs of Our Lives: Using Lyrics to Write Stories
Walt Whitman as a Model Poet: "I Hear My School Singing"
Students first analyze Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," then use Whitman's poem as a model as they create their own list poems.
Our Community: Creating ABC Books as Assessment
Students create alphabet books, which are used as an integrated assessment with science, health, social studies, and any other content area. This lesson plans looks at the theme of community.
Authentic Persuasive Writing to Promote Summer Reading
Turn summer reading lists from a teacher-centered requirement to a student-driven exploration by asking students to create brochures and flyers that suggest books to explore during the summer months.
Living the Dream: 100 Acts of Kindness
This lesson provides the "action piece" for any study of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this project, students participate in Dr. King's dream by doing 100 acts of kindness.
Playing Name Bingo with Chrysanthemum
In this twist on traditional bingo, the game boards feature students' names, and students answer questions designed to help them learn more about one another when their names are called.
Exploring the Power of Language with Six-Word Memoirs
What do the words we write really have to say about us? In this lesson, students examine the power of word choice as they write six-word memoirs of their lives.
A Getting-Acquainted Activity Using My Teacher's Secret Life
Students build classroom community as they get to know each other and their teacher better by sharing what they like to do outside school.
From Stop Signs to the Golden Arches: Environmental Print
Students bring the print-rich environment of the community into the classroom through the use of environmental print, enabling emergent readers to delight in the realization that they are indeed readers.
Rosa Parks was born on this day in 1913.
Rosa Parks was committed to the struggle for social justice and human rights until her death, inspiring millions of people around the world. Today, we celebrate her!
A Conversation with Walter Dean Myers
If there is anyone in the world of children's and young adult literature who could be described as a living legend, it's Walter Dean Myers. Tune in to hear how his own experiences as a reader have shaped his approach to storytelling, what he seeks to offer young people through his writing, and the thinking behind a select handful of his novels – books that incorporate concepts as varied as magical realism, the social contract, and oral histories with our nation's war veterans.
Write-Talks: Students Discovering Real Writers, Real Audiences, Real Purposes
There's a world of writers out there, and in this lesson students discover them as they listen to presentations from local writers and learn about what, why, and how they write in their day-to-day lives.
Teaching Audience Through Interactive Writing
Through interactive writing, students work together and then independently to create invitation letters for a group of their peers and their families.
Exploring and Sharing Family Stories
Writing gets personal when students interview family members in order to write a personal narrative about that person.
And the Question Is... Evaluating the Validity of a Survey
In this lesson, students learn to ask the right questions about the validity of surveys.
Building a Learning Community: Crafting Rules for the Classroom
Students will learn to mind their ps and qs in this lesson on etiquette and appropriate behavior in the classroom.
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.
The "1984" Macintosh commercial aired today during Super Bowl XVIII.
Original advertisements are created after students review advertising techniques they've studied.
The Barbie doll was unveiled in 1959.
Students explore body image and advertising through an activity where they bring in pictures from magazines that they read and discuss gender representations in the media.
Humorist Erma Bombeck was born in 1927.
Using lines from Bombeck's newspaper column, students identify allusive or satirical humor. Older students can rewrite the passages for a different audience.