Students examine great leads in children's literature before writing or revising a lead in their own writing.
Leading to Great Places in the Elementary Classroom
Rosa Parks was born on this day in 1913.
Rosa Parks was committed to the struggle for social justice and human rights until her death, inspiring millions of people around the world. Today, we celebrate her!
Read Across America Day: Celebrate a Nation of Diverse Readers
Bring the celebration of reading and literacy into your classroom, library, school, and home all year long.
Help a Child Choose a Book
Help children pick books that spark their interest, leave them feeling accomplished, and ready to hunt for their next book!
Literary Graffiti
Literary Graffiti, a high school version of the Doodle Splash student interactive, also aims to teach students to visualize what they are reading to help them develop as readers.
Stapleless Book
The Stapleless Book can be used for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating vocabulary booklets . . . the possibilities are endless!
Cube Creator
The interactive Cube Creator helps students identify and summarize key elements. It can be used as a prewriting or postreading activity.
Compare & Contrast Map
The Compare & Contrast Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for different kinds of comparison essays.
Fractured Fairy Tales
The Fractured Fairy Tale tool encourages students to create their own fractured fairy tales.
Bio Cube
Bio Cube is a useful summarizing tool that helps students identify and list key elements about a person for a biography or autobiography.
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.
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
Featuring descriptions and activities for fifty exceptional titles, Mary Jo Fresch and Peggy Harkins offer a wealth of ideas for harnessing the power of picture books to improve reading and writing in the content areas.
Tim O'Brien in the Classroom: "This too is true: Stories can save us"
As part of the NCTE High School Literature Series, Tim O'Brien in the Classroom focuses on opportunities for classroom discussion and writing assignments, including lessons, open-ended prompts, and student writing samples.
Exploring History
Hear about an amazing range of books that explore history, including works of fiction as well as non-fiction, biographies, graphic novels, verse novels, and investigative journalism.
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.
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.
Socratic Seminars
This strategy guide explains Socratic seminars and offers practical methods for applying the approach in your classroom to help students investigate multiple perspectives in a text.
Supporting Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners
This Strategy Guide is for developing comprehension that incorporates the gradual release of responsibility model.