Students write a narrative of place, a character sketch, an extended metaphor poem and a persuasive essay then link all four texts to quotations they have selected from a novel.
Reader Response in Hypertext: Making Personal Connections to Literature
Weather Detectives: Questioning the Fact and Folklore of Weather Sayings
Students adopt a skeptical stance and become weather detectives who ask "Why?" and "Why not?" as they investigate the history and validity of some common weather sayings.
Using Snowflake Bentley as a Framing Text for Multigenre Writing
Using Snowflake Bentley as a model, students create a working definition of multigenre text and then use that definition to create their own multigenre piece about winter or another theme.
The Year I Was Born: An Autobiographical Research Project
Students explore the year they were born through interviews and research, and then weave the details into a newspaper or booklet, written from another person's point of view.
Collaborating on a Class Book: Exploring Before-During-After Sequences
Students and the teacher produce a class book through a group-writing activity, focusing on a basic before-during-after sequence of events.
A Case for Reading - Examining Challenged and Banned Books
Students examine books, selected from the American Library Association Challenged/Banned Books list, and write persuasive pieces expressing their views about what should be done with the books at their school.
Mapping Characters Across Book Series
Students work on a guided characterization project, using a graphic map to illustrate the ways a character from a book series grows and evolves over the course of the story.
Freedom of Speech and Automatic Language: Examining the Pledge of Allegiance
This lesson has students explore freedom of speech by examining the Pledge of Allegiance from a historical and personal perspective and in relationship to fictional situations in novels.
Propaganda Techniques in Literature and Online Political Ads
Students analyze propaganda techniques used in pieces of literature and political advertisements. They then look for propaganda in other media, such as print ads and commercials.
Looking for the History in Historical Fiction: An Epidemic for Reading
This lesson pairs the reading of historical fiction with nonfiction to introduce students to the large themes of history.
Teaching Plot Structure through Short Stories
Students use an online graphic organizer to analyze the plot structure of "Jack and the Beanstalk" and three short stories.
Exploring Literature through Letter-Writing Groups
Students discuss literature through a series of letter exchanges, as a one-time assignment or throughout the year with the students discussing, and making connections among, a number of literary works.
Exploring Free Speech and Persuasion with Nothing But the Truth
Students read Avi's Nothing But the Truth and examine the First Amendment and student rights, and then decide whether the rights of the novel's protagonist, Philip, are violated.
Mail Time! An Integrated Postcard and Geography Study
Children write and receive postcards from friends and family, and then chart where all those postcards come from on a classroom map.
Writing ABC Books to Enhance Reading Comprehension
Using the alphabet as an organizing structure, students analyze literary elements in a book they have read and organize their observations in an alphabet book.
Introducing the Venn Diagram in the Kindergarten Classroom
In this lesson, kindergarten students manipulate hula hoops and real objects, as they use Venn diagrams to problem solve, explore, and record information to share with others.
Color Poems—Using the Five Senses to Guide Prewriting
Students use their five senses as a prewriting tool to guide their poetry writing as they compose free-form poems using imagery to describe a color.
Happily Ever After? Exploring Character, Conflict, and Plot in Dramatic Tragedy
By exploring the decisions points in a tragedy, students consider how the plot of the story can change if the key characters make a different choice at the turning point.
Creating Question and Answer Books through Guided Research
This series of activities is designed to teach research strategies. Students use KWL charts to guide their inquiry and publish their results in a collaborative question and answer book.
Inquiry on the Internet: Evaluating Web Pages for a Class Collection
Students use Internet search engines and Web analysis checklists to evaluate online resources then write annotations that explain how and why the resources will be valuable to the class.