Students explore the genre of posters, review informational writing and visual design, and then design poster presentations to share in class or at a school-wide fair.
Designing Effective Poster Presentations
Technology and Copyright Law: A "Futurespective"
Students research and report on instances of how copyright laws have adapted to encompass new technologies. They write articles predicting copyright issues that may arise with new and future technologies.
Copyright Law: From Digital Reprints to Downloads
Students investigate how and why copyright law has changed over time, and apply this information to recent copyright issues, creating persuasive arguments based on the perspective of a particular group.
Gaining Background for the Graphic Novel Persepolis: A WebQuest on Iran
To prepare students for reading the graphic novel Persepolis, this lesson uses a WebQuest to focus students' research on finding reliable information about Iran before and during the Islamic Revolution.
Worth Its Weight: Letter Writing with "The Things They Carried"
This lesson uses a letter-writing activity based on Tim O'Brien's story "The Things They Carried" to build empathy as students examine the weight they symbolically carry in their own lives.
It's My Life: Multimodal Autobiography Project
Students express themselves verbally, visually, and musically by creating multimodal autobiographies, exchanging ideas with other students and sharing important events in their lives through PowerPoint presentations.
Finding Poetry in Prose: Reading and Writing Love Poems
After reading several poems that expand the definition of love poetry, students compose found poems based on a personal memoireither their own or a love story of another writer.
Connecting Past and Present: A Local Research Project
In this unit, students become active archivists, gathering photos, artifacts, and stories for a museum exhibit that highlights one decade in their school's history.
The Children's Picture Book Project
In this lesson students evaluate published children's picture storybooks. Students then plan, write, illustrate, and publish their own children's picture books.
Bio-graph: Graphing Life Events
Students interview other students, choose significant life events, rate them, graph them, and write about one or more, in this activity that integrates mathematical graphing with writing.
Love of War in Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story"
Students explore the theme of love of war through texts on camaraderie among soldiers. They then compose a visual collage depicting their beliefs about the relationship between love and war.
When Less IS More—Understanding Minimalist Fiction
This lesson pairs Ernest Hemingway's short story "Cat in the Rain' with Raymond Carver's "Little Things" to guide students to an understanding of the characteristics of minimalist fiction.
Assessing Cultural Relevance: Exploring Personal Connections to a Text
As a class, students evaluate a nonfiction or realistic fiction text for its cultural relevance to themselves personally and as a group.
Making It Visual for ELL Students: Teaching History Using Maus
Spark the engagement of English-language learners or reluctant readers with the graphic novel Maus. The visual information provided by the genre serves as a support for reading and critical engagement.
Creating a Persuasive Podcast
Students learn how to get their voice out on the web when they research issues important to them and compose a persuasive podcast to post online.
Learning Clubs: Motivating Middle School Readers and Writers
Students participate in learning clubs, select content area topics, and draw on textsincluding websites, printed material, video, and musicto investigate their topics, and share their learning using similar media.
Exploring Careers Using the Internet
Doctors, astrophysicists, and daycare providers are only some of the careers that will be explored in this lesson in which students research careers and publish occupational summaries about them.
Recording Readers Theatre: Developing Comprehension and Fluency With Audio Texts
Students investigate audio texts of mystery stories, evaluate them in terms of both literary and audio qualities, and create Readers Theatre scripts, which they use to record their own podcasts.
Cultural Connections and Writing for Change
A little understanding can go a long way. After learning about difficulties that Palestinian youths face, students will write a letter to an official discussing these issues.
Earth Verse: Using Science in Poetry
Students shape up their reading, writing, and listening skills in this lesson by creating original diamante, acrostic, and shape poems about science.