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.
The goal of this lesson is to give students ownership over classroom policies by asking them to research and support a cell phone policy that they believe should be used in our classroom. Students will discuss and debate the policy after researching and then they will create the policy that we will follow for the first quarter. After the first quarter, we will reevaluate the policy for effectiveness. Students will use research and speaking and listening standards to complete this PBL for an authentic purpose. It is important to actually implement the policy for that particular class, or students will not feel the
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.
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.
Students will research a local issue, and then write letters to two different audiences, asking readers to take a related action or adopt a specific position on the issue.
The Compare & Contrast Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for different kinds of comparison essays.