Students take a walk on the wild side when they develop an understanding of nonfiction texts with hands-on experiences and intense analysis.

Did Paul Bunyan gouge out the Grand Canyon before or after he dug the Great Lakes? Students create a life-sized timeline showing the sequence of events in this tall tale.

Students engage in writing workshop, using a timeline to focus in on and write about a specific event.

What is it like to have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? Students find out in this lesson in which they "become" the characters in Judith Viorst's book.

Students practice with words and develop both definitional and contextual knowledge through two agents—purposeful sequencing of steps and collaboration with peers.

Use an engaging, authentic text to build students' knowledge of phonic elements and give them a taste of Japanese culture.

Students read Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis, demonstrate comprehension of the story by involving themselves in discussions, and analyze the characters in preparation for a class "press conference."

Students sing a popular children's song, follow along with a picture book that contains the lyrics and illustrations, and then participate in activities to reinforce learning of the vocabulary words.

Students identify interesting words from Shakespeare's plays and add them to a classroom vocabulary collection.

Graphic organizers assist the development of comparative vocabulary and generate discussions of analogy and metaphor in art as students go on a real or virtual tour of an art gallery.

Students learn about sentences by listing verbs, nouns, and adjectives. They use word cards to create descriptive sentences and work in groups to create the longest sentences they can.

Students demonstrate their letter/sound knowledge by working with name cards and sharing observations about their classmates' names, giving teachers an opportunity to assess knowledge in a meaningful context.

Using the guiding question, "What is reading?" students interact with a variety of texts as they uncover the skills necessary to interact with texts and develop a definition of reading.

Students read and analyze fairy tales from several cultures, identifying common elements. Choosing common situations, students write original fairy tales, using picture books as models and a peer review process.

Informational texts, iPads, and interactive games, oh, my! Help students journey through multimodal texts to identify and solve real-world mathematics problems using writing and apps.

This lesson encourages students to immerse themselves in poetry as they share their original poems orally and digitally with published poets and peers nationwide.

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

Give students an authentic reason to read and write by researching blogs written by their peers around the world and then writing their own.

What if students could see the relevance of their school curriculum to real-world, interesting, STEM-related careers? Let's help them create a great future!