Students examine great leads in children's literature before writing or revising a lead in their own writing.
Leading to Great Places in the Elementary Classroom
Stapleless Book
The Stapleless Book can be used for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating vocabulary booklets . . . the possibilities are endless!
Fractured Fairy Tales
The Fractured Fairy Tale tool encourages students to create their own fractured fairy tales.
Mystery Cube
The Mystery Cube helps students identify and summarize story elements in this popular genre. It can be used as a postreading or prewriting activity.
Trading Card Creator
This tool provides a fun and useful way to explore a variety of topics such as a character in a book, a person or place from history, or even a physical object. An excellent tool to for summarizing or as a prewriting exercise for original stories.
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
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.
Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults
Dakin explores different methods for getting students engaged--and excited--about Shakespeare's plays as they learn to construct meaning from the texts' sixteenth-century language and connect it to their twenty-first-century lives.
Reading for Learning: Using Discipline-Based Texts to Build Content Knowledge
Heather Lattimer provides practical, classroom-tested approaches to helping students access and critically respond to content-based texts.
Teaching YA Lit through Differentiated Instruction
Authors Susan L. Groenke and Lisa Scherff offer suggestions for incorporating YA lit into the high school curriculum.
Technology That Powers Up Learning
By designing lessons to activate prior knowledge and linking these activities to reading and writing, teachers found that students were more engaged, that they learned more material more quickly, and that they more willingly incorporated reading into their lives.
Tim O'Brien in the Classroom: "This too is true: Stories can save us"
As part of the NCTE High School Literature Series, Tim O'Brien in the Classroom focuses on opportunities for classroom discussion and writing assignments, including lessons, open-ended prompts, and student writing samples.
A Failure of the Imagination
This article discusses the imaginative activities and assignments that teachers often assign that violate the text around which the lesson is focused and that mislead students about its meaning.
Finding the Thread: Character, Setting, and Theme
An annotated bibliography of books that exemplify the plot elements, character, setting, and theme. Includes guidelines on how to do a book talk.
Teens and Trauma
Young adult literature about teens and trauma provides a window into mental illness and the toll it takes on young people. Stories of teens who are dealing with depression, anger, or the wish to die can be difficult to read, but they are important. They give voice to a particular kind of suffering, and they help us develop a deeper understanding of emotional pain. Just as important, they show us how people survive that pain and begin the process of healing. Tune in to hear about six new novels that focus on teens, trauma, and mental illness.
Talking with Teen Librarians
When it comes to motivating and inspiring teens to read, teen librarians have a lot to teach us. You'll hear about the approaches two teen librarians take to their work with teen readers, ways they go about sharing and promoting new titles, plus a short list of their favorite books for teens.