Students examine familiar car names for underlying connotations then proceed through a series of steps, increasing their control over language, until they select words with powerful connotations in their own writing.
Students engage in a brief writing assignment that concretely illustrates how language and gender stereotyping interact causally.
Through this lesson, primary students strengthen their phonemic awareness while using picture books featuring alliteration as models for their own writing.
This historical fiction story takes place in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression in New York City. Baseball was king and Babe Ruth was at the top of his game. In this story, a young boy and his father become a team as they both work to support their family.
This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary from the modern fable and play, The Baker's Neighbor. In this play, the neighborhood baker Manuel bakes delicious smelling pastries and puts them out for sale each morning, but his neighbor, Pablo, loves to smell the fresh bakery every morning without purchasing any pastries. This irritates Manuel to the point where he feels Pable should pay to smell his baked goods, and Manuel takes his complain to the town judge who eventually offers a ruling that allows Manuel to get the pleasure of "touching" Pablo's gold coins in return for Pable "smelling" the bakery.
When war breaks out in Mulans land and her father is drafted into the army, Mulan makes a great sacrifice when she disguises herself as a male to take her fathers place.
Diphtheria has broken out in Nome, Alaska. Teams of sled dogs carry medicine 800 miles over snow and ice to prevent an epidemic. Everyone was brave but one dog, Balto, made the difference between failure and success.
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.
Activities help students learn to keep a journal.
A Prince must find a girl who will love him, in spite of his frightening curse.
Students discuss a 17th-century painting that depicts musicians in the middle of a fight. They will write a one-paragraph description of the painting in the present tense. Students speculate about what happened before and after the scene depicted in the painting, and then use past and future tenses to write narratives based on their speculations. In the narratives, each student will add descriptive idioms about characters in the painting and draw a visual representation of an idiom.
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 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.
In this lesson students explore a number of sources to create a biographical timeline about a selected person. Students collaboratively research and resolve conflicting information they find during their investigation.
Students use a text set to increase understanding of content area material and demonstrate what they have learned by writing an original piece that blends together narrative and expository elements.
Make the most of your students' diverse ability levels and experience with a prewriting activity in which they describe an abstract idea using blogging and photographs that they have taken.
Students work together to create their own utopias, using blogs as the primary source of publication.