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.
Children find favorite words, phrases, and sentences from familiar stories. Working together, they combine their words and phrases to create a poem. The poem is then shared as performance poetry.
In this online lesson and activity, students actually "become" a character from a novel in their analysis of characterization. The lesson uses the Scarlet Letter, but any novel can be used. RL.9-10.3 Analyzing Characters, RL.11-12.3 Auth choice story elem
Students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using lists of accurate, powerful adjectives.
Is the case closed on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays? Student history detectives explore the evidence for and against one of the possible alternatives, Edward deVere, using the novel Shakespeare's Secret plus a variety of online sources.
Contains plans for three lessons that teach younger students the differences between letter writing and e-mail writing. In addition to objectives and standards, this instructional plan contains links to sites used in the lessons as well as assessment and reflection activities.
Students research mask-making from various cultures, highlight the masks' connections to cultural practices, compose poetry to reveal their understanding, analyze their own culture, and create personal masks and poetry.
Cinderella without castles, coaches, or ball gowns? Students use versions of Cinderella to explore how the setting of a story--time, place, and culture--affects the characters and plot.
Students in Grades 4-8 activate prior knowledge and research information about a historic event through fiction and nonfiction literature and exploration of relevant websites.
After reading and analyzing short examples of travel writing and discussing conventions of the genre, students write their own travel articles.
Students attend a 19th Century Victorian party to celebrate Scrooge's new outlook on life. They research characters from Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and assume those personas for the party.
Reading is revamped in this lesson in which students use a multimedia approach to study the books by Seymour Simon.
Go Away, Big Green Monster!ŰÓEd EmberleyŰŞs tale about a scary, multicolored monsterŰÓis used to help students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills. In this lesson, students chorally read the story and then point out familiar color words or sight words that appear in the story. After finishing the story, students are introduced to four different literacy center activities that include participating in a read along, building word families with story words, playing a memory game with color words from the story, and retelling story events using sentence strips. In the sessions that follow, students create their own artwork of the big green monster and use that artwork to help them write a story. Students use both self- and peer-editing to improve their writing. Completed stories are either published on the Internet or in a class book.
Contains plans for seven lessons that ask students to examine Supreme Court cases that have impacted civil liberties in the United States. Students work in groups and report their findings using PowerPoint presentations. In addition to objectives and standards, this instructional plan contains links to sites used in the lessons as well as assessment and reflection activities.
The game Bingo is transformed in this lesson in which students use symbols and images to make connections to environmental print through the use of personalized Bingo cards.
Contains plans for two lessons that teach environmental print to students using bingo games and matching cards. In addition to objectives and standards, this instructional plan contains links to sites used in the lessons as well as assessment and reflection activities.
Contains plans for five 30-40 minute lessons that ask students to create BioBags, a kind of literature autobiography. In addition to student objectives and standards, these instructional plans contains links to PDF handouts and links to sites used in the lessons as well as assessment and reflection activities.
Students create BioBags, a collection of texts that mark special times in their lives. BioBags provide a way for students to share a variety of events and texts.
Bio Cube is a useful summarizing tool that helps students identify and list key elements about a person for a biography or autobiography.
Students interview other students, choose significant life events, rate them, graph them, and write about one or more, in this activity that integrates mathematical graphing with writing.