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
Involving Students and Families in Ongoing Reflection and Assessment
Students begin by writing a sentence or two each week and progress to daily reflections and records of their school activity. Families respond to these student reflections, which become the basis for discussion among family, teacher, and students.
Chasing the Dream: Researching the Meaning of the American Dream
By conducting interviews, sharing and assessing data, and writing papers based on their authentic research, students reach their own conclusions on the meaning of the American Dream.
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.
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.
Persuasive Writing: What Can Writing in Family Message Journals Do for Students?
This lesson engages children in using writing to their families as a persuasive tool to get what they want and need.
Family Message Journals Teach Many Purposes for Writing
This lesson encourages children to explore authentic reasons for writing by writing messages to their family in a family message journal.
Trading Card Creator
This tool provides a fun and useful way to explore a variety of topics such as a character in a book, a person or place from history, or even a physical object. An excellent tool to for summarizing or as a prewriting exercise for original stories.
A Conversation with Sara Zarr
Tune in to hear Sara Zarr discuss religious faith and some of the thinking behind her newest novel, Once Was Lost.
Connection Web
Students use this printout to expand on connections they have made to a text and use those details to write essays or create projects about the text.
Double-Entry Journal
This printout helps students record ideas and situations from texts in one column, and their reactions in the second, thus making a connection between the text and themselves, another text, or the world.
RAFT Writing Template
Students can utilize this printout to organize their writing as they learn to use the RAFT strategy. This printout enables students to clearly define their role, audience, format, and topic for writing.
Making Connections
In this strategy guide, you'll learn to model how students can make three different kinds of connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world). Students then use this knowledge to find their own personal connections to a text.
Using the RAFT Writing Strategy
This strategy guide introduces the RAFT technique and offers practical ideas for using this technique to teach students to experiment with various perspectives in their writing.
Conducting Inner-Outer Circle Discussions
This guide shares the steps to take to get more students talking by dividing the group into speaking and non-speaking circles.
Teaching with Zooming Slideshows through Prezi
Through Prezi, a web application, students create "zooming" presentations for various purposes, such as presenting research, defending an opinion, or sharing a digital story.
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.
Telling a Story About Me: Young Children Write Autobiographies
Students tell their life stories in this lesson about autobiographies based on family photographs.
Exploring and Sharing Family Stories
Writing gets personal when students interview family members in order to write a personal narrative about that person.