Start the presses! Catchy titles, eye-popping graphics, and attractive fonts are all on students agendas in this lesson as they create magazine covers to summarize a topic.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students identify similes in poetry and gain experience in using similes as a poetic device in their own work.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Using The Giver, students discuss the importance recorded history. This provides context for descriptive writing of students own history in a lesson that integrates personal writing, research, and literary response.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students read and discuss literature about intolerance and diversity. They work with a partner to write two-voice poems that illustrate situations of intolerance at their school and suggest a step toward acceptance.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
In this lesson, students build classroom community by exploring environmental print and a teacher-created display that focuses on a favorite book. They then create and share their own presentations.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
How can we convince others to agree with us on important issues? In this lesson, students explore relevant environmental issues and gather information to write persuasive essays.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students use picture books as framing texts for research, freeing them from the language of encyclopedia sources and allowing them to focus their attention on the content of their papers.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
While common usage of the word, text, often refers to written or printed matter, literary and cultural theory extends the term to refer to any coherent set of symbols that transmit meaning to those who know how to read them. In an age where ideas may take many forms and be expressed across different media, texts and reading take on new implications.One goal of the Flows of Reading project is to inspire teachers and students to reflect on what can be considered as reading and what kinds of reading they perform in their everyday lives. Flows of Reading introduces an expanded concept of the term, text, and models a new type of readerĺäĄŕone who reads across different media and who understands reading as an activity of sharing, deconstructing, and making meaning.We have created a rich environment designed to encourage close critical engagement not only with Moby-Dick but a range of other texts, including the childrenĺäĄ_s picture book, Flotsam; Harry Potter; Hunger Games; and Lord of the Rings. We want to demonstrate that the bookĺäĄ_s approach can be applied to many different kinds of texts and may revitalize how we teach a diversity of forms of human expression.
Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Rather than focusing exclusively on literacy skills, the Common Core State Standards set expectations for the complexity of texts students need to be able to read to be ready for college and careers. This resource outlines three steps that will help teachers choose texts that are on grade level for the CCSS.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
This paper addresses the implications, for ELLs, of the new standard's requirement that students be able to read and understand complex, informationally dense texts. The authors discuss the types of supports that learners need in order to work with complex texts. They also provide a sample of what academic discourse involves, using an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. They demonstrate how English learners can be provided with strategies for accessing complex texts, such as closely examining one sentence at a time. The authors argue that instruction must go beyond vocabulary and should begin with an examination of our beliefs about language, literacy and learning.
Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy
