Based on the Guided Comprehension Model by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson helps students learn three types of connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world) using a double-entry journal.
Guided Comprehension: Making Connections Using a Double-Entry Journal
Swish! Pow! Whack! Teaching Onomatopoeia Through Sports Poetry
Students explore poetry about sports, looking closely at the use of onomatopoeia. After viewing a segment of a sporting event, students create their own onomatopoeic sports poems.
Tracking the Ways Writers Develop Heroes and Villains
Everyone knows that Star Wars character Darth Vader is a villain. This lesson asks students to explore how they know such things about heroes and villains they encounter in texts.
And I Quote: A Punctuation Proofreading Minilesson
Students review the basic conventions for using quotations from literature or references from a research project, focusing on accurate punctuation and page layout, then apply the conventions to their texts.
Constructing New Understanding Through Choral Readings of Shakespeare
After reading The Tempest or any other play by William Shakespeare, students work in small groups to plan, compose, and perform a choral reading based on a character or theme.
All's Well that Sells Well: A Creative Introduction to Shakespeare
Students compare attending a performance at The Globe Theater with attending a modern theater production or movie. They then create a commercial for an Elizabethan audience promoting a modern product.
The Ten-Minute Play: Encouraging Original Response to Challenging Texts
Students use both analytical and creative skills to adapt passages from a novel with significant internal dialogue and conflict, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, into a ten-minute play.
Weekly Writer's Blogs: Building a Reflective Community of Support
Students explore the conventions of blog writing while using it to self-reflect on their writing and communicate with classmates about each other's reflections.
Persuading Readers with Endorsement Letters
Students explore the genre of commercial endorsements, establishing characteristics and requirements for the genre. Each student then composes an endorsement of a product, service, company, or industry.
Help Wanted: Writing Professional Resumes
Students will create a beginning resume that represents their current work experience and demonstrates their knowledge of rhetorical situations for professional writing.
The Importance of Titles: From Big Blank Space to Small Good Thing
After examining two sets of stories that author Raymond Carver renamed in revision, students write a reflective essay in which they defend their choice of a title for one them.
Rummaging for Fiction: Using Found Photographs and Notes to Spark Story Ideas
In this lesson, students use found notes and found photographs as inspiration to help them identify subjects, settings, characters, and conflicts for pieces of creative writing.
Color of Silence: Sensory Imagery in Pat Mora's Poem "Echoes"
Pat Mora's poem "Echoes" demonstrates that our senses are powerful tools for literary analysis and comprehension as students use their senses to discover new ways to read and write.
Having My Say: A Multigenre Autobiography Project
Students compose a multigenre paper, modeled after the Delany sister's autobiography, Having Our Say, that includes the autobiographical narrative essay as well as an informational nonfiction piece.
Writing Technical Instructions
Students walk through the process of creating technical instructions by analyzing existing instructions, choosing an audience, writing their own instructions, receiving user feedback, and then revising and publishing their instructions.
Polishing Preposition Skills through Poetry and Publication
Students deepen and refine their understanding of prepositions by reading Ruth Heller's Behind the Mask. They write preposition poetry and create a study guide using an online tool.
Cover to Cover: Comparing Books to Movies
Students compare and analyze novels and the movies adapted from them. They design new DVD covers and a related insert for the movies, reflecting their response to the movie version.
Analyzing and Comparing Medieval and Modern Ballads
Students explore the ballads genre by reading medieval ballads to deduce their characteristics, acting out the ballads, comparing medieval and modern ballads using Venn diagrams, and composing their own ballads.
Exploring Setting: Constructing Character, Point of View, Atmosphere, and Theme
Students read texts by Dybek, Dickens, Poe, and Morrison to explore how authors use language to create setting and, in turn, how setting constructs other elements in a literary work.