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.
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
Teaching with Zooming Slideshows through Prezi
Through Prezi, a web application, students create "zooming" presentations for various purposes, such as presenting research, defending an opinion, or sharing a digital story.
Bringing Lessons to Life with Animoto
Using Animoto, a free Web 2.0 tool, students can develop short digital videos that include music, photos, video clips, and text as well as share their creations electronically.
Speak to Me: Teaching with Voki
Through Voki, a Web 2.0 tool, students create customizable avatars for class presentations for various purposes, such as presenting biographical information, expressing an opinion, or reading a poem.
Critical Literacy in Action: Multimodal Texts on Global Warming
Students will really warm up to this lesson about global warming as they study multimedia materials and use a variety of comprehension strategies.
Weather: A Journey in Nonfiction
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.
Finding Solutions to Food Waste: Persuasion in a Digital World
Using various reading strategies and resources, students explore the issue of food waste. They also create persuasive arguments and blog posts examining this topic.
Inspire Healthful Reading Using Unconventional Texts
This minilesson encourages children to seek out and appropriately react to nutrition labels and to make healthy food choices, integrating science, math, health, and literacy.
Engineering the Perfect Poem by Using the Vocabulary of STEM
Students research engineering careers and create poetry to understand the vocabulary of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
The Big, Bad Wolf...Is This a Fact?
Reading is revamped in this lesson in which students use a multimedia approach to study the books by Seymour Simon.
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.
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.
On this day in 1907, Rachel Carson was born.
Students learn about Rachel Carson, explore different environmental websites, and write a Diamante Poem about a particular habitat.
Jane Yolen was born in 1939.
Students read one of Jane Yolen's books, retell the story in the form of a puppet show, research animals in the book, and document their findings with the Animal Study interactive tool.
Science-fiction author Ray Bradbury was born in 1920.
Students do a Bradbury author study and then create flyers to advertise their favorite story using the ReadWriteThink Printing Press.
Sally Ride, first American woman in space, was born in 1951.
After exploring information about Sally Ride on the StarKids Who's Who site, students write a letter using the Letter Generator to Dr. Ride's foundation, Sally Ride Science.
Dr. Christian Barnard performed the first human heart transplant.
Students talk about the causes of heart disease and the role that diet and exercise play. Then, students find healthy dessert recipes and vote on one dessert to make in class.
Snowflake Bentley illustrator Mary Azarian was born in 1940.
Students catch snowflakes outdoors and sketch some of the structures, or grow their own snow crystals and examine them using magnifying glasses or microscopes.
It's Raining Cats and Dogs! Make a Children's Book about the Weather
Kids learn about weather sayings throughout history while writing and illustrating a book for younger children.
The Natural World as Inspiration: An Outdoor Art Show
Children incorporate materials from outdoors with paints or crayons to create pieces of art to display on their clotheslines, fences, or porches for a neighborhood art show.