Students hone their teamwork skills and play off each other's writing strengths as they participate in prewriting activities for a story to be written collaboratively by the whole class.

Using a collaborative story written by students, the teacher leads a shared-revising activity to help students consider content when revising, with students participating in the marking of text revisions.

Using different writing/drawing materials (e.g., markers, color pencils, pastels, etc.), students learn how to communicate different moods and/or feelings to support their written ideas and how authors do the same through their work.

Students use their five senses as a prewriting tool to guide their poetry writing as they compose free-form poems using imagery to describe a color.

The Comic Creator invites students to compose their own comic strips for a variety of contexts (prewriting, pre- and postreading activities, response to literature, and so on).

Multidimensional, challenging, and popular with students, comics provide an excellent way to introduce the concept of genres.

This lesson uses comic strip frames to define plot and reinforce the structure that underlies a narrative. Students finish by writing their own original narratives.

Students will research a local issue, and then write letters to two different audiences, asking readers to take a related action or adopt a specific position on the issue.

The Compare & Contrast Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for different kinds of comparison essays.

Students become familiar with the similarities and differences between electronic and printed text by comparing the textual aids included in a textbook with those of an educational website.

Which side will win as students investigate both sides of the battle of using print versus online text for research as they learn about the lives of Civil War soldiers?

Students discuss and compare differing versions of Little Red Riding Hood and other tales about wolves in cumulative read-aloud sessions and text set explorations.

In this lesson, students analyze similarities and differences among depictions of slavery in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", Frederick Douglass' "Narrative", and nineteenth century photographs of slaves. Students formulate their analysis of the role of art and fiction, as they attempt to reliably reflect social ills, in a final essay.

Students will really get into the swing of things as they analyze the text and film versions of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Pit and the Pendulum."

Using picture books as mentor texts, students learn effective strategies for organizing information that compares and contrasts. Students can then apply appropriate organizational strategies to their own papers.

The Comparison and Contrast Guide outlines the characteristics of the genre and provides direct instruction on the methods of organizing, gathering ideas, and writing comparison and contrast essays.

This unit introduces students to a variety of poetic forms and elements, as they compile their own collections of poetry.

Students identify, explore and apply the elements of circle plot structures to their own stories by using graphic organizers, reading and writing stories, and using checklists to assess their work.

Students use themed graphic organizers to compose cinquain poems on topics common in the early elementary classroom.

Reinforce student understanding of parts of speech through the analysis of sample cinquain poems followed by the creation of original cinquains.