What drives changes to classic myths and fables? In this lesson students evaluate the changes Disney made to the myth of "Hercules" in order to achieve their audience and purpose.
Sarah and Susan are sisters who enjoy spending Sunday afternoons with their great-great Aunt Flossie. Aunt Flossie entertains her great-grandnieces by letting them explore her collection of hats, each of which has a story of its own.
The author, Helen Lester, traces her writing career from the age of three to adulthood. She shares her struggles with writing in elementary school and even later as a successful writer. Helens story demonstrates that even the most challenging struggles can be overcome with persistence and a good sense of humor.
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.
This historical fiction story takes place in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression in New York City. Baseball was king and Babe Ruth was at the top of his game. In this story, a young boy and his father become a team as they both work to support their family.
This video segment from Wild TV takes a closer look at backyard bugs, their habitat and characteristics.
This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary from the modern fable and play, The Baker's Neighbor. In this play, the neighborhood baker Manuel bakes delicious smelling pastries and puts them out for sale each morning, but his neighbor, Pablo, loves to smell the fresh bakery every morning without purchasing any pastries. This irritates Manuel to the point where he feels Pable should pay to smell his baked goods, and Manuel takes his complain to the town judge who eventually offers a ruling that allows Manuel to get the pleasure of "touching" Pablo's gold coins in return for Pable "smelling" the bakery.
When war breaks out in Mulans land and her father is drafted into the army, Mulan makes a great sacrifice when she disguises herself as a male to take her fathers place.
Diphtheria has broken out in Nome, Alaska. Teams of sled dogs carry medicine 800 miles over snow and ice to prevent an epidemic. Everyone was brave but one dog, Balto, made the difference between failure and success.
A Prince must find a girl who will love him, in spite of his frightening curse.
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.
Learn about bees, their habitat and how to interact with a swarm in this Wild TV video segment.
In this video segment from WILD TV, learn about bees and the different techniques for handling them.
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.
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.
This lesson will involve work in oral language, concepts of print, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing with the use of one book, The Black Snowman.
One of the most respected works of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya tells the story of Antonio Juan Marez y Luna, a young boy who grapples with faith, identity, and death as he comes of age in New Mexico. The 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.
This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary from the text Blue Willow. Janey's father is an immigrant worker and this forces Janey and her family to move around every few months, but Janey finds a friend named Lupe and a place she would like to call home permanently. Janey has to go to Camp Miller School for immigrant children like herself and she finds once again she must learn whether the new teacher will be a friend or just another teacher like the ones before her.