Students use their emerging writing skills to write shopping lists. They work within a budget, use problem-solving skills to create lists, and buy their favorite treats at the class store.
This lesson uses "One Green Apple" by Eve Bunting to teach how characters change across a text. It will also guide students through writing an epilogue to accompany their independent book.
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 lesson will be turning heads and pages as students learn how to choose appropriate books for independent reading exercises and later evaluate their choices.
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.
Students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using lists of accurate, powerful adjectives.
Is the case closed on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays? Student history detectives explore the evidence for and against one of the possible alternatives, Edward deVere, using the novel Shakespeare's Secret plus a variety of online sources.
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 in Grades 4-8 activate prior knowledge and research information about a historic event through fiction and nonfiction literature and exploration of relevant websites.
After reading and analyzing short examples of travel writing and discussing conventions of the genre, students write their own travel articles.
Students attend a 19th Century Victorian party to celebrate Scrooge's new outlook on life. They research characters from Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and assume those personas for the party.
Reading is revamped in this lesson in which students use a multimedia approach to study the books by Seymour Simon.
Go Away, Big Green Monster! Ed Emberley's tale about a scary, multicolored monster is used to help students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills. In this lesson, students chorally read the story and then point out familiar color words or sight words that appear in the story. After finishing the story, students are introduced to four different literacy center activities that include participating in a read along, building word families with story words, playing a memory game with color words from the story, and retelling story events using sentence strips. In the sessions that follow, students create their own artwork of the big green monster and use that artwork to help them write a story. Students use both self- and peer-editing to improve their writing. Completed stories are either published on the Internet or in a class book.
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.