Students explore using electronic messaging and Internet abbreviations for specific purposes and examine the importance of using a more formal style of writing based on their audience.
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.
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.
Students attend a 19th Century Victorian party to celebrate Scrooge's new outlook on life. They research characters from Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and assume those personas for the party.
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.
After reading several examples of how a published author incorporates facts in fiction writing, students research a topic of their choice and write fictional diary entries that incorporate factual information.
The Book Cover Creator is designed to allow users to type and illustrate front book covers, front and back covers, and full dust jackets. Students can use the tool to create new covers for books that they read as well as to create covers for books they write individually or as a class.
Students respond to a book they have read by thinking symbolically to create a business card for one of the characters.
Students examine books, selected from the American Library Association Challenged/Banned Books list, and write persuasive pieces expressing their views about what should be done with the books at their school.
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 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.
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).
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?
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.
Using Construct-a-Word, students learn letter-sound correspondence by combining a beginning letter or blend to a word ending to create words.
After reading "The Tempest" or any other play by William Shakespeare, students work in small groups to plan, compose, and perform a choral reading based on a character or theme.
Students investigate how and why copyright law has changed over time, and apply this information to recent copyright issues, creating persuasive arguments based on the perspective of a particular group.
Students explore the motivation behind characters' actions in "To Kill A Mockingbird" by creating psychological profiles for characters from the novel.
Students learn how to get their voice out on the web when they research issues important to them and compose a persuasive podcast to post online.
Graphic organizers assist the development of comparative vocabulary and generate discussions of analogy and metaphor in art as students go on a real or virtual tour of an art gallery.