Students read biographies and explore websites of selected American authors and then role-play as the authors.
3, 2, 1... Blast off! Students learn new vocabulary by taking a virtual field trip to the moon, read-alouds, creating a picture dictionary, and completing a final writing activity.
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.
To prepare for literature circles featuring historical novels, students research the decades of the 1930s to the 1990s and share their information using Prezi, a web application for creating multimedia presentations.
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.
After reading several examples of how a published author incorporates facts in fiction writing, students research a topic of their choice and write fictional diary entries that incorporate factual information.
Students create a personalized biography for their reading buddy, and each child is the author, illustrator, and editor.
This lesson describes how small groups of students can plan meetings to discuss what they've read in a "just for fun" book club they've organized - and that they control.
The Book Cover Creator is designed to allow users to type and illustrate front book covers, front and back covers, and full dust jackets. Students can use the tool to create new covers for books that they read as well as to create covers for books they write individually or as a class.
Explore the parts of book covers and dust jackets with this online guide, designed to to allow users to review the content that appears on each portion of these artifacts.
Students write a persuasive letter to the editor of a newspaper from a selected fictional character's perspective, focusing on a specific issue or situation explored in the novel.
Students respond to a book they have read by thinking symbolically to create a business card for one of the characters.
In this alternative to the traditional book report, students respond to a play they have read by creating a resume for one of its characters.
Students must think critically to create comic strips highlighting six important scenes from a book they have read.
In this alternative to the traditional book report, students create book trailers using Microsoft Photo Story 3, a free downloadable software program for digital storytelling.
Students explore familiar literary characters, usually first encountered as adults, but whose childhood stories are only told later. Students then create childhoods for adult characters from books of their choice.
Students explore book covers of a variety of books then create a new cover for a book they have read.
Comic frames are traditionally used to illustrate a story in a short, concise format. In this lesson, students use a six-paneled comic strip frame to create a story map, summarizing a book or story that they've read. Each panel retells a particular detail or explains a literary element (such as setting or character) from the story.
In this alternative to the traditional book report, students report on their novel choices using Facebook-like pages.