It's raining cats and dogs! Students explore figurative language through read-alouds, teacher modeling, and student-centered activities, further developing their understanding of the literal versus the metaphorical translations of idioms.

Through a study of Langston Hughes' poetry, students connect his writing to his place in history.

A big green monster helps students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills through choral reading, literacy center activities, and writing stories.

Students write authentic newspaper stories, including learning about various aspects of newspapers, such as writing an article, online articles, newspaper reading habits, and layout and design techniques.

Classroom biography study offers high-interest reading with a purpose, as students begin with inquiry and research, summarize and organize their information, and prepare oral presentations to share with the class.

In this lesson, students use both fiction and nonfiction texts, the Internet, and a K-W-L chart to learn about how animals survive the winter.

"2-4-6-8, students will be spelling great" in this lesson that teaches the y rule for adding suffixes through cheering the spelling of words aloud, word sorts, and writing stories.

Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy of monitoring.

Questions about weather clear up when students use what they learned from their books to create a presentation to share with the rest of the class.

Paper and pixels get compared in this lesson in which students compare both printed and online versions of a magazine.

Students will be crawling all over this assignment when they use illustrations and text to learn about life from a bug's point of view.

Students compare the traits fact and fiction by using a Venn diagram to compare fiction and nonfiction books about Native Americans.

Students participate in a scavenger hunt for shapes; reading, writing, and discussion of shapes encourage literacy and math skills.

Students tell their life stories in this lesson about autobiographies based on family photographs.

Students' responses to this lesson will be out of this world after they've researched astronomy to write poetry and compile a poetry book.

Students research mask-making from various cultures, highlight the masks' connections to cultural practices, compose poetry to reveal their understanding, analyze their own culture, and create personal masks and poetry.

A picture is worth a thousand words as students are guided in viewing wordless picture books and responding to four different types of questions about the images they see.

Imagination and application are key to this tall tale lesson in which students take what they know about tall tales to spin a yarn of their own.

In an effort to help motivate students to read nonfiction, students are challenged to use a timeline to help them name the year when certain products were invented.

Students take a walk on the wild side when they develop an understanding of nonfiction texts with hands-on experiences and intense analysis.