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.

Students rework their forgotten/abandoned drafts by cutting and covering up selected words. By creatively manipulating text, they explore portal writing, a strategy for envisioning a new story or story direction.

Students are often asked to perform speeches, but rarely do we require students to analyze speeches as carefully as we study works of literature. In this unit, students are required to identify the rhetorical strategies in a famous speech and the specific purpose for each chosen device. They will write an essay about its effectiveness and why it is still famous after all these years.

In this lesson, students incorporate analyses of characters from The Crucible with examinations of original seventeenth-century portraits of Puritans to create a visual portrait of the character. The project culminates in a "Portrait Gallery Walk" where students present and defend their artwork.

Readers are often transported to the places mentioned in texts through words and descriptions. This lesson invites students to create travel brochures about the setting of texts they have read.

Students write letters expressing personal views on issues like equal pay, equal education/employment opportunity, and gender roles—and receive these letters six years later.

Students use persuasive writing and an understanding of the characteristics of letters to the editor to compose effective letters to the editor on topics of interest to them.

In small groups, students closely examine one sentence from the Gettysburg Address and create a multigenre project communicating what they have discovered about the meaning and significance of the text.

Students stage a mock trial for a literary character, with groups of students acting as the prosecution, defense, and jury.

Students explore the year they were born through interviews and research, and then weave the details into a newspaper or booklet, written from another person's point of view.

Students explore a variety of resources as they learn about the Holocaust. Working collaboratively, they investigate the materials, prepare oral responses, and produce a topic-based newspaper to complete their research.

This lesson has students explore freedom of speech by examining the Pledge of Allegiance from a historical and personal perspective and in relationship to fictional situations in novels.

Students read Avi's Nothing But the Truth and examine the First Amendment and student rights, and then decide whether the rights of the novel's protagonist, Philip, are violated.

Children write and receive postcards from friends and family, and then chart where all those postcards come from on a classroom map.

Students use their emerging writing skills to write shopping lists. They work within a budget, use problem-solving skills to create lists, and buy their favorite treats at the class store.

Students write resumes for historical fiction characters. They first explore help wanted ads to see what employers want, and then draft resumes for the characters they've chosen.

This lesson encourages students to use rhyming words to write rebus poetry modeled on rebus books, which substitute pictures for the words that young students cannot yet identify or decode.

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.