Students in grades 4 and 5 discuss inferential comprehension and visualization as they use a think-aloud questioning strategy to develop a deeper understanding of a historical novel.

Students often believe that fiction writers make everything up, seldom realizing how research worms its way into entertaining writing. In this lesson, students read Diary of a Worm to find out how fact merges with fiction.

Poetry and politics combine in this lesson where students write a free verse poem in the voice of Cesar Chavez.

Students participate in a scavenger hunt for shapes; reading, writing, and discussion of shapes encourage literacy and math skills.

Students read "After Twenty Years" by O. Henry, use a word map to identify characters' qualities or traits, discuss the characters' feelings and actions, and reflect upon these in journals.

This lesson encourages students in grades 4 and 5 to think critically and write persuasively by focusing on preparing, presenting, and evaluating mock campaign speeches.

A is for zoo? Q is for duck? The alphabet as students know it is transformed when students create a class book that contains clever associations for each letter of the alphabet.

Students learn about the process of questioning and using webs to organize information during reading and then practice writing factual and inferential questions.

Interpreting art is a subjective process. In this lesson, students write written responses analyzing a work of art and use feedback from their peers to revise or confirm their initial responses.

Students explore the role of prefixes, as well as their origins and meanings, and examine how the understanding of prefixes can improve comprehension, decoding, and spelling.

Students read biographies and explore websites of selected American authors and then role-play as the authors.

Students learn how to effectively deal with bullying by participating in literature response groups and writing about when they experienced a similar situation or emotion as a fictional character.

A picture is worth a thousand words as students are guided in viewing wordless picture books and responding to four different types of questions about the images they see.

What makes you happy? What makes you sad? Connecting words to feelings enriches vocabulary and helps with concept development.

Imagination and application are key to this tall tale lesson in which students take what they know about tall tales to spin a yarn of their own.

"That's my position and I'm sticking to it!" After reading about the Korean War, students will take a position in response to an open-ended question, support their position, and evaluate that support.

Where did the stars come from? What makes lightning and thunder? Pourquoi tales are narratives developed by various cultures around the world to explain natural phenomena. Students study three tales and learn about their cultures of origin, then work cooperatively to write and present an original pourquoi tale.

In an effort to help motivate students to read nonfiction, students are challenged to use a timeline to help them name the year when certain products were invented.