Students practice writing detailed, sensory-rich descriptions by framing a small piece of nature and freewriting about it. From this minilesson, students can develop a variety of types of writing.

Students analyze the lyrics to Cole Porter's "You're the Top!" and then update them to include current "tops" in pop culture.

C is for Culture in this lesson in which students research a culture different from their own and compile an alphabet book that showcases cultural symbols for each letter of the alphabet.

The classroom becomes a stage in this interactive lesson in which students sing, act, and design comic strips to learn the meanings and spellings of common homophones.

Introduce students to the idea that movies and TV have their own language and grammar, which gives them special ways of telling their stories.

Students compile a playlist of 10 songs representing a literary character and explain their choices based on the book's dialogue, plot, conflict, and resolution.

Students hone their critical thinking skills by learning how to make inferences from textual clues.

Students learn about word families by reading Kevin Henkes's book Chrysanthemum, identifying words with certain vowel pair endings, and reading words with similar endings.

Gentle, gigantic, graceful—do these g words describe the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk? Students will explore the hard and soft g sounds by studying fairy tales and animals.