Jonathan Swift's 1729 pamphlet "A Modest Proposal" is a model for satirizing social problems. In this lesson, students complete multiple readings of Swift's essay: a guided reading with the teacher, a collaborative reading with a peer, and an independent reading. The online Notetaker tool helps students restate key ideas from Swift's essay as they read and elaborate upon these ideas postreading. After independent reading, pairs of students develop a mock television newscast or editorial script, like those found on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update," The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report, including appropriate visual images in PowerPoint.

A great poet of the Western landscape, Jeffers celebrated the heartbreaking beauty of existence and reminded humanity of its responsibility to the natural world. The Big Read Readers Guide deepens your exploration with biography, timelines, and historical information. We hope these educational materials allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American poet.

Rosa Lublin is a Holocaust survivor whose memories of a Nazi death camp continue to traumatize her thirty years later. Cynthia Ozick's heartbreakingly empathic novella achieves one of fiction's loftiest goals, giving readers insight into a stranger's heart. This Big Read Readers Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, timelines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American author.

In this activity, students read short stories and create presentations in multiple media to share in a Short Story Fair. At the fair, students explore and respond to the displays.

In this interactive Kindergarten through 2nd grade activity, literacy and exercise unite! Using sight word flashcards, students use their bodies to spell out simple sight words. The use of their creativity and imaginations is encouraged so students can also identify how to make their bodies long, round, wide and narrow. This lesson primarily focuses on the use of psychomotor, cognitive andaffective skills. ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.

This poem describes the feelings of a girl whose best friend, Hanna, has moved away. The little girl feels that nothing will be the same again since her friend left.

This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions and Common Core literacy strategies to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary using the text, "Sing to the Stars." Ephram loves to play the violin, and when he discovers that a blind neighbor was once a musician, but stopped playing the piano due to a family tragedy, he encourages the man to return to his music. Each encourages the other, and they perform together at a community concert.

This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions and Common Core literacy strategies to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary using the story Skylark. In this story, a family struggles on a prairie farm during a drought. They are forced to make a painful choice when their water soon runs out.

In this video segment from Between the Lions, children from Mississippi introduce and pronounce familiar items that begin with the /s/ sound that the letter "c" makes. Each word is displayed on screen, with the letter "c" highlighted, to emphasize the same sound at the beginning of each word. ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.

This folktale is about three monks who visit a village filled with unhappy people. The villagers do not welcome the monks, so the three monks decide to make stone soup to teach the villagers a lesson in happiness.

This video segment from Between the Lions is an original, animated story based on the popular folktale ˆStone Soup.íń Aliens visit a town and request food but nobody wants to share. The aliens decide to make stone soup and everybody decides to contribute ingredients for the communal meal. The video emphasizes the "s" sound and features the following words: sweeping, sidewalks, sifting, sandboxes, sorting, socks, sudden, sky, saw, spaceship, sight, sorts, secret, sorry, special, stone, soup, supper, sounds, strange, simmering, seven, seconds, salt, since, somewhere, spoon, savory, soy sauce, second, some, slurp, still, satisfied, squash, succotash, salsa, satsumas, stuff, superb, sublime, simply stupendous, succulent, superior, salad, salmon, sausage, schnitzel, stuffed, and sole. This video segment provides a resource for Fluency, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Language and Vocabulary Development, Letter Knowledge Awareness, and Phonological Awareness. ***Access to Teacher's Domain content now requires free login to PBS Learning Media.

Julian meets Gloria, a new girl in his neighborhood. Together they make a wish kite, with wishes fastened to its tail; both wish for lasting friendship.

This African folk tale explains how many African tales came to be known as ŕSpider stories.ĚŇ In this tale, Ananse, the Spider man, travels up to the sky to offer to buy Nyame, the Sky Gods, stories. Nyame asks Ananse to bring him Osebo the leopard-of-the-terrible-teeth, Mmboro the hornets-who-sting-like-fire, and Mmoatia the fairy-whom-men-never-see. Ananse agrees to the price but Nyame believes that Ananse is too small and weak to accomplish such a task. Ananse uses his intelligence and cunning to trick all three creatures. He returns to Nyame with payment for his stories. Nyame calls his court together to sing the praises of Ananse and declares his stories ŕSpider stories.ĚŇ

Students analyze personal homepages, as well as a character in a book they have read, and then create a homepage for the character.

The Story Map interactive is designed to assist students in prewriting and postreading activities by focusing on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution.

This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions and Common Core literacy strategies to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary using the illustrated text, "The Stranger." This story uses a mixture of pictures and words to explore the idea of the changes of the seasons and the expected natural events that occur with it' colder weather, leaves changing color, Jack Frost and migration. Chris Van Allsburg walks a fine line between reality and fantasy to create a mystery about the identity of the stranger who will represent the seasonal change from summer to fall. The Houghton Mifflin authors identify the storyĺĺs theme as an allegory for autumn and the use of personification to make the association.

In this Strategy Guide, you'll learn about a number of specific methods that can help you to gain a fuller picture of the interests of your students as well as what your students understand, know, and can demonstrate by doing.

By understanding the varying literacy strengths and habits of our students we can identify what Vygotsky calls their "zone of proximal development" where literacy opportunities are not too hard as to frustrate or too easy to bore but just challenging enough to promote student learning. With a keen eye, we can observe the interests and strengths of our students and, when possible, we can consider these to plan learning opportunities for our students. By providing choice and respectful tasks, we can provide meaningful literacy experiences.

Strategic reading allows students to monitor their own thinking and make connections between texts and their own experiences. Students who make connections while reading are better able to understand the text they are reading. It is important for students to draw on their prior knowledge and experiences to connect with the text. Students are thinking when they are connecting, which makes them more engaged in the reading experience.

Students gain a deeper understanding of a text when they make authentic connections. However, teachers need to know how to show students how a text connects to their lives, another text they have read, or the world around them. In this strategy guide, you will learn how to model text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections for your students so that they may begin to make personal connections to a text on their own.

Effective differentiation begins with purposeful assessment. In this strategy guide, you’ll learn how to construct an authentic performance-based reading assessment that will give you access to students’ thinking before, during, and after reading.

In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers. Likewise, this strategy can be used to pair older students with younger students to create “reading buddies.” Additionally, children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a text that they have already read, for continued understanding and fluency work. This research-based strategy can be used with any book or text in a variety of content areas, and can be implemented in a variety of ways.