The list of ten things about Opal's absent mother that her father shares in "Because of Winn-Dixie" serves as inspiration for students to create their own lists describing literary characters.

Students find examples of adjectives in a shared reading. Then students "become" major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using powerful adjectives.

Character Perspective Charting allows students to compare multiple characters and their points of view to better understand a story.

Students explore what Carol Jago calls the place "where life and art intersect" by reading Nikki Giovanni's poem, "Nikki-Rosa," and then writing about childhood memories of their own.

Students investigate the effects of word choice in Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star" to construct a more sophisticated understanding of speaker, subject, and tone.

Students analyze ńchoose your own adventureî stories and brainstorm to develop setting, characters, and plots for their own adventures stories and related Websites.

In this minilesson, students explore the use of dialogue tags such as "he said" or "she answered" in picture books and novels, discussing their purpose, form, and style.

Students select what they believe to be the most important word in a text that they have read and justify their choice using examples from the text.

Students explore how active and passive voices are appropriate to different audiences. They examine online resources, and then draw conclusions about verb use, which they apply to their own writing.

Students make purposeful choices for their reading materials, thinking about their reasons for reading a book and using strategies to match books to their abilities.

Students become online authors in this lesson in which they write and post a short story using wiki technology.

Students and the teacher produce a class book through a group-writing activity, focusing on a basic before-during-after sequence of events.

Students hone their teamwork skills and play off each other's writing strengths as they participate in prewriting activities for a story to be written collaboratively by the whole class.

Using a collaborative story written by students, the teacher leads a shared-revising activity to help students consider content when revising, with students participating in the marking of text revisions.

This resource guide begins by outlining the theory underlying the literacy work and then lays out the framework for the supports included in the Readers series. Subsequent chapters describe and illustrate the specific content literacy and language development strategies that have been chosen as being of particularly high impact. Although most of the strategies can be used in multiple ways, we have chosen to present them as occurring "Before, €During€ and After Reading" because of the importance of this mental model in effective content literacy instruction.

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.

Pat Mora's poem "Echoes" demonstrates that our senses are powerful tools for literary analysis and comprehension as students use their senses to discover new ways to read and write.

Students explore stereotypes in the media and representations of race, class, ethnicity, and gender by analyzing comics over a two-week period and then re-envisioning them with a "comic character makeover."

Multidimensional, challenging, and popular with students, comics provide an excellent way to introduce the concept of genres.

This lesson uses comic strip frames to define plot and reinforce the structure that underlies a narrative. Students finish by writing their own original narratives.