Students learn about word families by reading Kevin Henkes's book Chrysanthemum, identifying words with certain vowel pair endings, and reading words with similar endings.

Seven blind mice—see how they spend each day of the week in this lesson that uses the book Seven Blind Mice to guide students through shared reading, writing, and listening activities.

Students will find that learning onset and rime is a handy skill when they read the Jack and Jill rhyme.

The Word Wizard activities in this lesson transform phonics from drudgery into delight! Students manipulate letters to make different words.

Students apply and build their knowledge of letters and letter sounds as they play games and interact with letters online, creating their own ABC book as a final activity.

Traditional chants and songs are adapted to help young students recognize and generate rhymes. The word and letter patterns involved in rhymes provide a stepping stone to reading skills.

Students improve phonemic awareness through games and chants that help them isolate beginning and ending sounds and connect them with their written symbols (graphemes).

"Run, run, as fast as you can." Students use this refrain from The Gingerbread Man to learn letter-sound correspondence. Students use their new skills to write an online story.

Students will need their language-building hard hats as they construct words using onset and rime, building vocabulary and phonics comprehension.

Variable vowels are the focus of this lesson; students use nursery rhymes and ow to study how vowels can change their sounds according to different spelling patterns.

Students take poetic license when they interpret William Carlos William's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" to help create a poem of their own.

Students read three short stories about women; discuss the development of female characters, gender differences, and society's expectations; and write scripts in which the characters discuss their similarities and differences.

It's important to "hook" readers at a story's beginning, but it's equally important to keep them interested. In this lesson, students learn to write effective conclusions to their own stories.

Students make predictions about Bridge to Terabithia and its characters, complete character studies, and relate the characters' experiences to their own as they identify ways to make and keep friends.

Students evaluate book reviews written by other children, discussing their components and effectiveness, and write reviews of favorite books to record on video or post online.

Students will whistle while they work on this lesson, creating a photomontage movie of their interpretation of a favorite song's lyrics that will end everyone's day on a high note.

Using selected characters from a text of their choice, students put their literary analysis skills to work by creating fictional character trading cards.

The game Bingo is transformed in this lesson in which students use symbols and images to make connections to environmental print through the use of personalized Bingo cards.

Students analyze the concepts of identity, stereotyping, and discrimination by reading picture books; identify how these concepts are dealt with in each book; and discuss concrete actions to stop discrimination.