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.
Speak to Me: Teaching with Voki
Promoting Student-Directed Inquiry with the I-Search Paper
The sense of curiosity behind research writing gets lost in some school-based assignments. This Strategy Guide provides the foundation for cultivating interest and authority through I-Search writing, including publishing online.
Inquiry Charts (I-Charts)
This guide introduces I-Charts, a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing.
Question the Author (QtA)
In this guide, you'll be introduced to a strategy that requires students to challenge their understanding and solidify their knowledge while reading a text.
Exit Slips
This strategy guide introduces the concept of using Exit Slips in the classroom to help students reflect on what they have learned and express what or how they are thinking about the new information. Exit Slips easily incorporate writing into the content area classroom and require students to think critically.
Power Notes
The strategy examined in this Strategy Guide teaches students an outlining technique to help them differentiate between main ideas and details in their reading and writing.
Reading in the Reel World: Teaching Documentaries and Other Nonfiction Texts
John Golden offers middle and high school teachers a practical guide for using documentary film in the classroom to improve students' reading, writing, and thinking skills.
Tracking the Ways Writers Develop Heroes and Villains
Everyone knows that Star Wars character Darth Vader is a villain. This lesson asks students to explore how they know such things about heroes and villains they encounter in texts.
The Ten-Minute Play: Encouraging Original Response to Challenging Texts
Students use both analytical and creative skills to adapt passages from a novel with significant internal dialogue and conflict, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, into a ten-minute play.
The Importance of Titles: From Big Blank Space to Small Good Thing
After examining two sets of stories that author Raymond Carver renamed in revision, students write a reflective essay in which they defend their choice of a title for one them.
Rummaging for Fiction: Using Found Photographs and Notes to Spark Story Ideas
In this lesson, students use found notes and found photographs as inspiration to help them identify subjects, settings, characters, and conflicts for pieces of creative writing.
Having My Say: A Multigenre Autobiography Project
Students compose a multigenre paper, modeled after the Delany sister's autobiography, Having Our Say, that includes the autobiographical narrative essay as well as an informational nonfiction piece.
Writing Technical Instructions
Students walk through the process of creating technical instructions by analyzing existing instructions, choosing an audience, writing their own instructions, receiving user feedback, and then revising and publishing their instructions.
Cover to Cover: Comparing Books to Movies
Students compare and analyze novels and the movies adapted from them. They design new DVD covers and a related insert for the movies, reflecting their response to the movie version.
Exploring Setting: Constructing Character, Point of View, Atmosphere, and Theme
Students read texts by Dybek, Dickens, Poe, and Morrison to explore how authors use language to create setting and, in turn, how setting constructs other elements in a literary work.
Beyond "What I Did on Vacation": Exploring the Genre of Travel Writing
After reading and analyzing short examples of travel writing and discussing conventions of the genre, students write their own travel articles.
Exploring Change through Allegory and Poetry
Students read an example of allegory, review literary concepts, complete literary elements maps and plot diagrams, create a pictorial allegory, and write diamante poems related to the theme of change.
Creative Outlining-From Freewriting to Formalizing
After reading a short story, students use freewriting as a catalyst for a literary analysis essay.