By reading a short book aloud, Rick Kleine models for his students how their initial theories of character traits can change over time. Using peer discussion and class participation, the kids are engaged throughout, giving them what Rick hopes will be a life-long love of reading.

While students read silently in class, Rick has time to focus on individual students and their particular reading challenges. He works on vocabulary, comprehension and reading speed, using a variety of methods to help his students improve.

Rick Kleine structures his class with mini lessons, reading aloud, peer discussions and silent reading. He also speaks individually with his students, giving each a focused task for improvement to increase their comprehension and enjoyment, while making them better readers.

By conferring individually with his students, Rick Kleine gives out tasks tailored to their needs and reading goals. Because his students have differing abilities, he keeps track of each of their goals in order to follow up with them each day to monitor their progress.

Welcome to Essential Reading. This course has been designed to enable you to focus your learning on specific areas of improvement. Unlike a typical college course where you would complete lessons in chronological order, this course allows you to focus on just specific skills. Modules Include: Recognition and Decoding, Vocabulary, and Functional and Informational Texts

Studying Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," students explore the intricate relationship between a poem's form and its content.

Rockin Russian is designed to give students exposure to the Russian language and culture through the medium of Russian music videos. Students are able to perfect their grammar while rocking out to music videos from Russia's pop stars. Based on Russian music videos from MTV Russia, Rockin' Russian is supplemented with exercise materials focusing on pronunciation, vocabulary development, grammar and cultural features. Parts of the videos are embedded into exercises in each category that students can revisit, strengthening their language skills.

Erskine Caldwell was a Georgia novelist. He published his controversial work, "God's Little Acre," in 1933 about the 1920's in Georgia. This is an excerpt and writing prompt aligned to the SS8H8 standard and the Social Studies Literary Standards.

In this text, students will be reading and thinking critically about work written by and about women over about a 1500 year period. From non-fiction to drama to poetry and short fiction, students will study many different kinds of literature from a variety of voices and perspectives.

This video was created to introduce middle school students to science fiction as a genre. It was intended for educational and instructional purposes only.

This article features children's literature about scientists and scientific research in the Arctic and in Antarctica.

This Module examines some of the reasons that adolescents struggle with content-area text and overviews effective strategies teachers can use to improve the vocabulary and comprehension skills of students with a wide range of abilities and across a variety of subjects (est. completion time: 1.5 hours).

This lesson focuses on reducing subject relative clauses as well as shortening relative pronouns. An example of reducing a subject relative clause might be removing “who is” from the sentence, “the man who is standing over there.” In that exampleRelative pronouns include that, which, who, whom, what, and whose.An example might be “He doesn’t like the shirt that I bought.”In defining relative clauses, when the relative pronoun (that) is the object of the clause (I bought)we can drop the relative pronoun.If you want additional lesson plans and support, including teachers’ notes, be sure to register for a free Off2Class account.

This light activity deals with "silent letters" of English language which are encountered in a large number of English language words. Students read a fairly simple dialogue with the blanks for words containing silent letters. Silent letters, however, are listed while the rest of the letters are blanked. Students find the missing words and become aware of silent letters. Great activity for a warm-up.

This lesson requires students to use their reading, comprehension, and analysis skills to analyze a poem and respond creatively to the selection.

This book is best thought of as a map that introduces some of the essential element of small group communication. It begins with some foundational information necessary for understanding what makes groups groups. Briefly, it will provide conceptual and practice elements that help inform how we are to think about actually defining groups and teams. It moves from there to explore the idea of group formation, helping us better understand why people join groups and how they participate within that setting. The following chapters explore issues such as cooperation, power, group thinking, listening, and making decisions together. These constituent elements of small group communication help us think about the themes that them come in the next chapters–how we address issues that cause conflict and the role of leaders within these settings. In the last chapter, the impact of culture and diversity are explored, reminding us of the ever present reality that virtually any group is comprised of people with different experiences, worldviews, ideologies, perspectives, and approaches. Sometimes those differences are obvious; other times, it is only through deeper exploration of issues together that one discovers the rich differences that color our world.

This resource was created by Prairie Compton, in collaboration with Dawn DeTurk, Hannah Blomstedt, and Julie Albrecht, as part of ESU2's Integrating the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education, practice, and coaching.

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the first great Latin American poet, is still considered one of the most important literary figures of the American Hemisphere, and one of the first feminist writers. In the 1600s, she defended her right to be an intellectual, suggesting that women should be educated and educators and accusing men of being the cause of the very ills they blamed on women.

In Sounding Out activities, students take a regular word, such as sat, produce the letter-sound pattern "sssaaat," and blend to produce the word sat. This is a crucial development in learning to read, bringing together skills that students have spent many weeks working on and providing the first excitement of reading unaided. Being able to sound out regular words also provides students with a self-teaching capability: they can decode unaided words they do not yet recognize on sight.