Students become familiar with the similarities and differences between electronic and printed text by comparing the textual aids included in a textbook with those of an educational website.
Compare and Contrast Electronic Text With Traditionally Printed Text
In the Poet's Shoes: Performing Poetry and Building Meaning
Students take poetic license when they interpret William Carlos William's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" to help create a poem of their own.
Once They're Hooked, Reel Them In: Writing Good Endings
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.
Digital Reflections: Expressing Understanding of Content Through Photography
Striking images can leave lasting impressions on viewers. In this lesson, students make textselfworld connections to a nature- or science-related topic as they collaboratively design a multimedia presentation.
Media Literacy: Examining the World of Television Teens
Pop culture and the classroom collide in this lesson when students go behind the scenes to analyze a television series for characterization to use in an original television show proposal.
Music and Me: Visual Representations of Lyrics to Popular Music
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.
Sharing Favorite Books Using Interactive Character Trading Cards
Using selected characters from a text of their choice, students put their literary analysis skills to work by creating fictional character trading cards.
Reading Informational Texts Using the 3-2-1 Strategy
Students can count on using the 3-2-1 strategy to help them successfully comprehend and write about an informational text.
Play Ball! Encouraging Critical Thinking Through Baseball Questions
Cooperation and critical thinking are the name of the game as students use baseball facts they find online to create trivia questions for a class Jeopardy game.
A Race With Grace: Sports Poetry in Motion
In this lesson, athletics, aesthetics, and poetics intersect in new ways as developing literacy learners experiment together with the forms of language.
Choosing the Right Book: Strategies for Beginning Readers
Students make purposeful choices for their reading materials, thinking about their reasons for reading a book and using strategies to match books to their abilities.
Comparing Electronic and Print Texts About the Civil War Soldier
Which side will win as students investigate both sides of the battle of using print versus online text for research as they learn about the lives of Civil War soldiers?
Exploring Compare and Contrast Structure in Expository Texts
Students build their understanding of the terms compare and contrast by participating in class discussions, using Internet resources, working collaboratively, and by visually representing information in a Venn diagram.
Exploring How Section Headings Support Understanding of Expository Texts
Nonfiction may be dull for some students, but this lesson helps them focus on the main ideas. Through awareness of section headings, students learn to sort and categorize main concepts.
Hero's Journey
Students can use this tool to learn about the elements of the hero's journey, analyze a text that follows the hero's journey pattern, or start creating a hero story of their own.
Profile Publisher
Students use the Profile Publisher to draft online social networking profiles, yearbook profiles, and newspaper or magazine profiles for themselves, other real or fictional characters.
CD/DVD Cover Creator
The CD/DVD Cover Creator allows users to type and illustrate CD and DVD covers and related booklets for liner notes and other information. Students can use the tool to create covers for books, music, and films that they explored as well as to create covers for media they compose individually or as a class.
Postcard Creator
The Postcard Creator helps students learn to identify all the typical parts of a postcard, and then generate their own postcard messages by typing information into letter templates. After printing their texts, students can illustrate the front of their postcards in a variety of ways, including drawing, collage, and stickers.
Book Cover Creator
The Book Cover Creator is designed to allow users to type and illustrate front book covers, front and back covers, and full dust jackets. Students can use the tool to create new covers for books that they read as well as to create covers for books they write individually or as a class.
Flip Book
The Flip Book is designed to allow users to type and illustrate tabbed flip books up to ten pages long. Students and teachers can use the flip book for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating question and answer booklets.