Students debate about incorporating service-learning into their school's curriculum.

Students learn about the life and music of John Lennon, write a short story from their lives integrating lyrics from some of their favorite songs, and create a class book of stories.

Using different writing/drawing materials (e.g., markers, color pencils, pastels, etc.), students learn how to communicate different moods and/or feelings to support their written ideas and how authors do the same through their work.

Students are often asked to perform speeches, but rarely do we require students to analyze speeches as carefully as we study works of literature. In this unit, students are required to identify the rhetorical strategies in a famous speech and the specific purpose for each chosen device. They will write an essay about its effectiveness and why it is still famous after all these years.

Students create a checklist outlining what effective writers do, revise his or her own writing, and engage in a written conversation to help peers with the revision process.

Students become novice lexicographers as they explore recent new entries to the dictionary, learn the process of writing entries for the Oxford English Dictionary, and write a new entry themselves.

Students use social networking sites to trace the development of characters by assuming the persona of a character on the class Ning and sending a set number of tweets, or status updates.

After reading several examples of how a published author incorporates facts in fiction writing, students research a topic of their choice and write fictional diary entries that incorporate factual information.

Students first analyze Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," then use Whitman's poem as a model as they create their own list poems.

Students learn how to differentiate between a news story and a feature story by writing a profile of a classmate.

Nikki Giovanni's poem "The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr." is paired with Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, taking students on a quest through time to the Civil Rights movement.

Students explore the concepts of audience and purpose by focusing on an issue that divided Americans in 1925, the debate of evolution versus creationism raised by the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Students read science fiction texts and then use nonfiction texts to extrapolate the scientific principles presented as they discuss the "what ifs" within the context of scientific principles.

This lesson, in which students research worms in order to create a classroom habitat, incorporates reading and writing across content areas as well as math and science activities.

Students explore the idea of "different Englishes" by reading Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" and writing literacy narratives about their own use of different language for different audiences and purposes.

Writing a review of an author's work challenges students to develop their critical thinking skills. It provides an opportunity for students to speak their minds—and to enjoy being heard.

Students write an owner's manual that helps them get to know their classroom, provides them with a sense of ownership, and lets others know about their classroom.

Students create alphabet books, which are used as an integrated assessment with science, health, social studies, and any other content area. This lesson plans looks at the theme of community.

This lesson uses Ben's Dream by Chris Van Allsburg to highlight ten major landmarks of the world. Students research the landmarks and present their findings to the class.