Students select a book to read based only on its cover art. After reading the book, they use an interactive tool to create a new cover for it.
Students make bookmarks on computers and share their ideas with other readers at their school, while practicing summarizing, recognizing symbols, and writing reviews-all for an authentic audience.
Students identify the elements of fiction in a book they have read and share summaries of them by writing and illustrating their own mini-book.
Students write resumes for historical fiction characters. They first explore help wanted ads to see what employers want, and then draft resumes for the characters they've chosen.
Students work in groups to create annotated book reviews with links to topics of interest related to their book.
Students utilize their reading and writing skills as they think critically in order to sort books in multiple ways.
Students become novice lexicographers as they explore recent new entries to the dictionary, learn the process of writing entries for the Oxford English Dictionary, and write a new entry themselves.
Through a series of picture book read-alouds, students engage in critical discussion of complex issues of race, class, and gender.
Though teachers usually caution students against using sentence fragments, Edgar Schuster's work demonstrates that professional writers often use fragments effectively. This lesson helps students understand that there are reasons that they can and should use sentence fragments to become effective writers.
During interactive read-aloud sessions, students identify how an author conveys mathematical information about animals' sizes and abilities. They then conduct research projects focusing on the same mathematical concepts.
As a culminating activity for "Slaughterhouse-Five", students make a compilation album (a CD with 6-8 tracks) that reflects their analysis, understanding, and reaction to the ideas in the novel "Slaughterhouse-Five".
Imagine if vocabulary could come alive with the click of a button! Students create video posters to demonstrate knowledge of new economics vocabulary.
Students create brochures on the same topic as another piece of writing they have done, highlighting how shifting purposes and audiences creates changes in their strategies as writers.
What do your students think about each other? Find out as you teach them the concepts of acrostic poems and challenge them to write an uplifting acrostic about a classmate.
Students learn components of think-alouds and type-of-text interactions through teacher modeling. In the process, students develop the ability to use think-alouds to aid in reading comprehension tasks.
Students research the effects of the Vietnam war on a specific group of people who were involved. They then create Internet scavenger hunts to share with the class.
Students choose unfamiliar words from their reading and create a multigenre, multimodal glossary of terms.
Students will learn to mind their ps and qs in this lesson on etiquette and appropriate behavior in the classroom.
In this author study, students listen to and discuss four books by Leo Lionni. They identify similarities and differences in the stories and then compare two stories of their choice.
This lesson is sure to sizzle, not fizzle, as students use comic strips to find onomatopoetic words, develop a vocabulary list from the words, and discuss why writers use onomatopoeia.