Through listing and observation, students identify the many texts that they read and compose: including books and magazines, television shows, movies, audio broadcasts, hypertexts, and animations.

Savagery, treachery, lost innocenceÉ "Lord of the Flies" is rife with character development. Use this lesson to help students chart the character changes of Ralph and Jack, both in groups and individually.

Students thoroughly explore identifying synonyms and adjectives before using them to add variety and interest to their own writing.

Students demonstrate comprehension by responding to open-ended questions based on the Newbery Honor book "Mr. Popper's Penguins", and then draw from the text and their personal experiences to create journals.

Students use the elements of persuasion for a specific audience to demonstrate their understanding of Richard WrightŐs accessible and engaging coming-of-age novel, "Rite of Passage.

Students will have a roaring good time when they watch a scene from "The Lion King" as a way to compare standard and described programming media.

Students write descriptions of 100th day bottles they create at home, write clues about their bottles for a guessing game, practice descriptive writing, and create a class book.

In this series of four lessons, students will explore key elements of design in "Little Blue and Little Yellow" to learn about setting, character relationships, and plot.

Using "The Grapes of Wrath" as a backdrop, students conduct research on issues that the novel addresses, publishing their findings in a multigenre museum exhibit.

Students read Raymond Carver's story "A Small, Good Thing," focusing on characterization in order to develop one of the static characters: the hit-and-run driver who causes ScottyŐs death: more fully.

Students will love unwrapping this lesson about before, during, and after reading activities based on Margaree King MitchellŐs book, "GrandaddyŐs Gift".

Students analyze their past readings and use that knowledge to create reading plans for the future.

Student pairs aim to be the first team to call out "bingo" in this lesson in which they use skimming and scanning to locate information about ancient Greece and Rome.

ŇThatŐs my position and IŐm sticking to it!Ó 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.

Students collaboratively interact with a variety of texts as they define reading and develop their own ReaderŐs Profiles modeled after online social networking sites.

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 compare the traits fact and fiction by using a Venn diagram to compare fiction and nonfiction books about Native Americans.

A read-aloud of Patricia PolaccoŐs "Thank You, Mr. Falker" helps promote deeper comprehension through questioning to achieve personal connections and discussions of character and theme.

Striking images can leave lasting impressions on viewers. In this lesson, students make text-self-world connections to a nature- or science-related topic as they collaboratively design a multimedia presentation.