Students use trading cards to examine fictional characters in a story.
Cooperation and critical thinking are the name of the game as students use baseball facts they find online to create trivia questions for a class Jeopardy game.
In this twist on traditional bingo, the game boards feature students' names, and students answer questions designed to help them learn more about one another when their names are called.
Students play with and explore prepositions during a whole group reading of Ruth HellerŐs Behind the Mask, and then by composing and publishing prepositional poems based on the bookŐs style.
Students learn that the plot structure described by Freytag's Pyramid is actually quite familiar as they diagram the plots of a familiar story, a television show, and a narrative poem.
After reading John Updike's "Ex-Basketball Player," students write poems describing themselves five years in the future. The teacher takes the poems and mails them to students in five years.
Students put their heads together in a poetry circle to learn and practice different forms of poetry.
Students' groans about studying poetry may disappear with this lesson in which students read poetry from various writers and use these poems to examine the sounds and sense of language.
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.
Working as career counselors for a literary character, students find a job for the character, prepare a resume, and design questions and answers to prepare them for a job interview.
Students read a variety of picture books that contain elements of the heroŐs journey and use an online interactive tool to analyze the stories.
Students learn content area vocabulary and increase reading comprehension using the Vocabulary, Language, Prediction (VLP) approach.
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."
Writing professional reviews teaches students to understand audience, content, and publication guidelines. In this lesson, students put these into practice as professional writers critiquing, designing, and publishing reviews on Amazon.com.
Students use the Profile Publisher to draft online social networking profiles, yearbook profiles, and newspaper or magazine profiles for themselves, other real or fictional characters.
Students create a checklist outlining what effective writers do, revise his or her own writing, and engage in a written conversation to help peers with the revision process.
Puzzle Me Words is a fun, educational game for primary students that reinforces letter sounds and how sounds combine to form words.
After exploring several question and answer books on a variety of topics, students research a topic and create their own class question and answer book.
In this lesson, athletics, aesthetics, and poetics intersect in new ways as developing literacy learners experiment together with the forms of language.
Useful for a wide variety of reading and writing activities, this outlining tool allows students to organize up to five levels of information.