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.
Seasonal Haiku: Writing Poems to Celebrate Any Season
Found Poems/Parallel Poems
Students compose found and parallel poems based on a descriptive passage they have chosen from a piece of literature they are reading.
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!
Haiku Poem Interactive
Students can learn about and write haiku using this interactive that guides them through the writing process.
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.
Diamante Poems
This online tool enables students to learn about and write diamante poems.
Acrostic Poems
This online tool enables students to learn about and write acrostic poems. Elements of the writing process are also included.
Theme Poems
Formerly known as Shape Poems, this online tool allows elementary students to write poems in various shapes.
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.
360 Degrees of Text: Using Poetry to Teach Close Reading and Powerful Writing
Through Eileen Murphy Buckley's 360-degree approach to teaching critical literacy, students investigate texts through a full spectrum of learning modalities, harnessing the excitement of performance, imitation, creative writing, and argument/debate activities to become more powerful thinkers, readers, and writers.
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.
Celebrating Poetry for Teens
In honor of National Poetry Month in April, tune in for recommendations of a variety of poetry books for teens.
Haiku Starter
This graphic organizer provides students the opportunity to brainstorm words about a given topic, count and record the syllables, and draft a haiku.
Connection Web
Students use this printout to expand on connections they have made to a text and use those details to write essays or create projects about the text.
RAFT Writing Template
Students can utilize this printout to organize their writing as they learn to use the RAFT strategy. This printout enables students to clearly define their role, audience, format, and topic for writing.
Tips For Using Movie Maker
It's easy to make a movie today, thanks to software that may already be on your home computer. Sounds fun, and it's a lesson in how to communicate ideas.
Acrostic Poem
Acrostic poems are fun to write. Your students will find constructing them easy, too, thanks to this helpful tool, which has endless possibilities for curriculum integration.
Diamante Poem
This tool will allow your students to create a diamante poem by reflecting on their knowledge of a topic and by using nouns, verbs, and adjectives in a creative manner.
Appreciating Audiobooks
In this episode, you'll hear about what goes on behind the scenes in audiobook production. You'll also hear samples from an array of distinguished audio titles including YA classics as well as newer works of contemporary realistic fiction, dystopian fiction, historical fiction, and novels written in verse.