Students make bookmarks on computers and share their ideas with other readers at their school, while practicing summarizing, recognizing symbols, and writing reviews—all for an authentic audience.
Book Report Alternative: Summary, Symbol, and Analysis in Bookmarks
Grades
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Choose Your Own Adventure: A Hypertext Writing Experience
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Unit
Students analyze "choose your own adventure" stories and brainstorm to develop setting, characters, and plots for their own adventures stories and related Websites.
Grades
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Dr. Seuss's Sound Words: Playing with Phonics and Spelling
K - 2
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Boom! Br-r-ring! Cluck! Moo!Everywhere you turn, you find exciting sounds. Students use these sounds to write their own poems based on Dr. Seuss's Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?
Grades
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Using Picture Books to Teach Characterization in Writing Workshop
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students explore character development through experiences with picture books. They learn about the connections between reading and writing and apply the information they learn to revisions of their own writing.
Grades
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Letter Poems Deliver: Experimenting with Line Breaks in Poetry Writing
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students explore letter poems and experiment with writing letters as poems, using the placement of line breaks to enhance rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance.
Grades
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How Big Are Martin's Big Words? Thinking Big about the Future
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Minilesson
Inspired by the book Martin's Big Words, students explore information on Dr. King to think about his "big" words, then they write about their own "big" words and dreams.
Grades
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What Makes Poetry? Exploring Line Breaks
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Minilesson
Students read various poems and explore why lines are broken where they are and how they affect rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance in poetry.
Grades
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It Doesn't Have to End That Way: Using Prediction Strategies with Literature
K - 2
Lesson Plan
| Minilesson
After listening to the beginning of a story, students use details in the text, personal experience, and prior knowledge to predict the way the story will end.
Grades
|
Who's Got Mail? Using Literature to Promote Authentic Letter Writing
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students discuss and chart letter elements and write their own letters to adults at school, reinforcing letter-writing skills beyond the classroom lesson.
Grades
|
Growing Readers and Writers with Help from Mother Goose
K
Lesson Plan
| Recurring Lesson
Watch Mother Goose work her magic! This lesson uses nursery rhymes to help emergent readers remember the letters and their sounds and identify word chunks.
Grades
|
Alliteration in Headline Poems
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Minilesson
Students will be introduced to the term alliteration and create a headline poem consisting of 25 words that contain at least three examples of alliteration.
Grades
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Book Clubs: Reading for Fun
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Recurring Lesson
This lesson describes how small groups of students can plan meetings to discuss what they've read in a "just for fun" book club they've organizedand that they control.
Grades
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Daily Book Boosts
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Recurring Lesson
Book Boostsone-minute raves at the end of independent reading timeare easy ways to suggest new titles to students, and they act as a way for students to have something to think about as they read.
Grades
|
Composing Cinquain Poems: A Quick-Writing Activity
1 - 2
Lesson Plan
| Minilesson
Students use themed graphic organizers to compose cinquain poems on topics common in the early elementary classroom.
Grades
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Story Character Homepage
6 - 8
Lesson Plan
| Unit
Students analyze personal homepages, as well as a character in a book they have read, and then create a homepage for the character.
Grades
|
Poetry from Prose
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Working in small groups, students compose found and parallel poems based on a descriptive passage they have chosen from a piece of literature they are reading.
Grades
|
Literature Circles with Primary Students Using Self-Selected Reading
K - 2
Lesson Plan
| Recurring Lesson
Students respond to self-selected books in journals, and talk about their books daily in small groups. The teacher guides students by offering suggestions and writing with them in dialogue journals.
Grades
|
Composing Cinquain Poems with Basic Parts of Speech
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Reinforce student understanding of parts of speech through the analysis of sample cinquain poems followed by the creation of original cinquains.
Grades
|
Fairy Tales from Life
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Unit
Picture books provide the basis for an analysis of fairy tale elements before students write their own original tales.
Grades
|
Seasonal Haiku: Writing Poems to Celebrate Any Season
3 - 5
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
After listening to haiku poetry, students use seasonal descriptive words to write their own haiku, following the traditional format. They then publish their poems by mounting them on illustrated backgrounds.