Students analyze personal homepages, as well as a character in a book they have read, and then create a homepage for the character.
Story Character Homepage
Literature Circles with Primary Students Using Self-Selected Reading
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.
Fairy Tales from Life
Picture books provide the basis for an analysis of fairy tale elements before students write their own original tales.
Literature Circles: Getting Started
Students practice different ways of collaborating to read a work of literature. They work in different roles as they compose and answer questions, discover new vocabulary, and examine literary elements.
Leading to Great Places in the Middle School Classroom
Students examine leads in existing texts and create alternative leads for them before revising leads in their own writing.
Leading to Great Places in the Elementary Classroom
Students examine great leads in children's literature before writing or revising a lead in their own writing.
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.
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.