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.
Professional Writing in Action! Publishing Student Reviews Online
Authoring an Epilogue That Helps Our Characters Live On
This lesson uses One Green Apple by Eve Bunting to teach how characters change across a text. It will also guide students through writing an epilogue to accompany their independent book.
Developing Persuasive Arguments through Ethical Inquiry: Two Prewriting Strategies
In this lesson, students use focused prewriting strategies to explore content and ethical issues related to a persuasive assignment.
What's the Purpose?: Examining a Cold Manipulation of Language
With a crafty pen, Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood to create a new genre and shock his audience. This lesson will help students examine Capote's manipulation of language as he forces his audience to take a different look at murderers and consider a different definition of nonfiction. His unique purpose leaves students an interesting text to consider.
Literature Response in Primary Classrooms
This step-by-step literature response template for use with read-alouds asks students to use drawing and writing to respond to increasingly-complex prompts which address literary elements as well as personal connections.
Audience & Purpose: Evaluating Disney's Changes to the Hercules Myth
What drives changes to classic myths and fables? In this lesson students evaluate the changes Disney made to the myth of "Hercules" in order to achieve their audience and purpose.
Active Reading through Self-Assessment: The Student-Made Quiz
This recurring lesson encourages students to comprehend their reading through inquiry and collaboration. They choose important quotations from the text and work in groups to formulate "quiz" questions that their peers will answer.
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.
Sí, Se Puede: Making a Difference, One Letter at a Time
After reading the book ¡Si, Se Puede!/Yes, We Can!: Janitor Strike in L.A., students learn about labor unions, strikes, and organizing for change. Students interview staff members in their school to learn about their daily work life, and write persuasive advocacy letters.
Writing for Audience: The Revision Process in The Diary of Anne Frank
After reading or viewing The Diary of Anne Frank, students will make connections between audience and purpose and revise a journal entry with an outside audience in mind.
Boars and Baseball: Making Connections
In this lesson, students will make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections after reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. After sharing and discussing connections, students choose and plan a project that makes a personal connection to the text.
And in Conclusion: Inquiring into Strategies for Writing Effective Conclusions
While drafting a literary analysis essay (or another type of argument) of their own, students work in pairs to investigate advice for writing conclusions and to analyze conclusions of sample essays. They then draft two conclusions for their essay, select one, and reflect on what they have learned through the process.
Character Clash: A Minilesson on Paragraphing and Dialogue
Students learn about paragraphing conventions in dialogue by revising their own writing.
Growing Readers and Writers with Help from Mother Goose
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.
Shared Spelling Strategies
Students increase their spelling accuracy and retention, while preserving fluency, by using sound, sight recall, and analyzing strategies instead of memorizing words, as they deal with spelling during drafting.
Draw a Story: Stepping from Pictures to Writing
Students draw a series of pictures that tell a story, including character action, problem and solution. They ‘read' their story to others, transcribe it into writing, and create an accordion book.
Composing Cinquain Poems with Basic Parts of Speech
Reinforce student understanding of parts of speech through the analysis of sample cinquain poems followed by the creation of original cinquains.
Have Journal...Will Travel: Promoting Family Involvement in Literacy
Students build positive memories of literacy activities when they take turns taking home a book bag stuffed with items to encourage literacy interactions with their families.
What's in a Name? Teaching Concepts of Letter and Word
In this recurring activity, the process of choosing a helper for the day becomes a literacy activity, with the helper's name as a starting place for reading and writing.
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.