Students get to write a whale of a tale when they complete a graphic organizer sequencing the journey of a mountain fish to a polluted waterway.
Reading and Writing About Pollution to Understand Cause and Effect
Guided Comprehension in Action: Teaching Summarizing With the Bio-Cube
Students learn the ins and outs of writing biographies by researching a contemporary or historical figure and writing a summary.
Read a Song: Using Song Lyrics for Reading and Writing
This lesson will be music to the students' ears when they hear that they get to read song lyrics and compose original lyrics for a familiar song.
Developing Story Structure With Paper-Bag Skits
Lights, camera, action, and a bit of mystery! In this lesson, students use mystery props in a skit bag to create and perform in short, impromptu skits.
Casting Shadows Across Literacy and Science
Shadows, shadows, everywhere! In this lesson, students read fiction, informational text, and poetry about shadows to extend their knowledge of the concept before casting their own shadow poetry.
Zines for Kids: Multigenre Texts About Media Icons
Special edition! Students use ReadWriteThink tools to create magazines about prominent figures using a variety of writing genres and styles.
Cowboys and Castles: Interacting With Fractured Texas Tales
What do cowboy hats have to do with fairy tales? Two traditional fairy tales and their Texas-based counterparts set the stage for five different ways to respond to text.
Poetry Portfolios: Using Poetry to Teach Reading
Teach your students about sentence structure, rhyming words, sight words, vocabulary, and print concepts using a weekly poem.
Lights, Camera, Action: Interviewing a Book Character
Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.
Using a Predictable Text to Teach High-Frequency Words
After reading an engaging yet predictable text about a child looking for his cat, students use a similar format and high-frequency words to craft tales about their own lost pets.
Alaska Native Stories: Using Narrative to Introduce Expository Text
Tradition and technology come together in this lesson in which students learn about Alaskan animals through Native American tales and their own online research.
Multimedia Responses to Content Area Topics Using Fact-"Faction"-Fiction
Students climb into the mind of a spider in this lesson that asks them to compose a spider diary using spider facts, fiction, and "faction"fiction that sounds like fact.
Using THIEVES to Preview Nonfiction Texts
Students become "thieves" in this lesson as they use a previewing strategy to "steal" information from textbooks and other nonfiction texts before actually reading them.
From Fact to Fiction: Drawing and Writing Stories
Students gather factual information about frogs and toads to create nonfiction and fiction stories. Drawing is used for prewriting.
Traveling Terrain: Comprehending Nonfiction Text on the Web
Students locate specific information, identify text features of nonfiction text, and write to generalize information on related topics.
Exploring World Cultures Through Folk Tales
Journey around the world with students as they read a Japanese, African, or Welsh folk tale, create a visual depiction of the tale, research the tale's culture, and present findings.
Compare and Contrast Electronic Text With Traditionally Printed Text
Students become familiar with the similarities and differences between electronic and printed text by comparing the textual aids included in a textbook with those of an educational website.
In the Poet's Shoes: Performing Poetry and Building Meaning
Students take poetic license when they interpret William Carlos William's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" to help create a poem of their own.
Getting to Know You: Developing Short Biographies to Build Community
How well do your students know their peers? Students transform into investigative reporters as they interview a classmate, compile the biographical data into graphic form, and introduce the student to the class.
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.