Students prepare an already published scholarly article for presentation, with an emphasis on identification of the author's thesis and argument structure.
Students demonstrate their letter/sound knowledge by working with name cards and sharing observations about their classmates names, giving teachers an opportunity to assess knowledge in a meaningful context.
Students whose first language is not English reflect on nature through readings, a visit to a green area, and bookmaking using the writing process and peer feedback.
Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).
Students use persuasive writing and an understanding of the characteristics of letters to the editor to compose effective letters to the editor on topics of interest to them.
The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.
OVERVIEW
Students need to practice all types of writing, and oftentimes argumentative writing is ignored in favor of persuasive writing. In fact, students may not even understand there is a difference between these two types of writing. In this lesson, students examine the differences between argumentative writing and persuasive writing. After choosing topics that interest them, students conduct research which becomes the foundation for their argumentative essays.
The Plot Diagram is an organizational tool focusing on a pyramid or triangular shape, which is used to map the events in a story. This mapping of plot structure allows readers and writers to visualize the key features of stories.
The Postcard Creator helps students learn to identify all the typical parts of a postcard, and then generate their own postcard messages by typing information into letter templates. After printing their texts, students can illustrate the front of their postcards in a variety of ways, including drawing, collage, and stickers.
Students learn content area vocabulary and increase reading comprehension using the Vocabulary, Language, Prediction (VLP) approach.
The interactive Printing Press is designed to assist students in creating newspapers, brochures, and flyers.
After examining recipes written based on students' favorite fairy tales, students research a recipe related to their favorite story, book, or fairy tale and include it in a classroom recipe book.
High school students are taught how to use resumes and cover letters to highlight their skills and make them stand out, whether applying to college or for a job.
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.
In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and classroom topics to encourage a high degree of classroom participation and assist students in developing a conceptual understanding of a topic through the use of the Think-Pair-Share technique.
The Think-Pair-Share strategy is designed to differentiate instruction by providing students time and structure for thinking on a given topic, enabling them to formulate individual ideas and share these ideas with a peer. This learning strategy promotes classroom participation by encouraging a high degree of pupil response, rather than using a basic recitation method in which a teacher poses a question and one student offers a response. Additionally, this strategy provides an opportunity for all students to share their thinking with at least one other student which, in turn, increases their sense of involvement in classroom learning. Think-Pair-Share can also be used as in information assessment tool; as students discuss their ideas, the teacher can circulate and listen to the conversations taking place and respond accordingly.
In this strategy guide, you’ll learn about Partner Talk—a way to provide students with another learning opportunity to make learning their own through collaboration and discussion. Partner Talk can be used for assessing classwork, making connections to prior knowledge, discussing vocabulary, or simplifying concepts.
One of the main goals of the English Language Arts Common Core Standards is to build natural collaboration and discussion strategies within students, helping to prepare them for higher levels of education and collaboration in the workforce. In today’s classrooms, students are using complex texts and are being asked to use a variety of strategies and provide evidence-based responses. Partner Talk is a best practice that gives students an active role in their learning and scaffold the experience for students.
In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and texts to allow for learning that meets the diverse needs of students but keeps student groups flexible.
The research that originally gave credibility to the jigsaw approach—creating heterogeneous groups of students, diving them into new groups to become expert on a topic, and then returning them to their home groups—touted its value as a means of creating positive interdependence in the classroom and improving students’ attitudes toward school and each other.
Stories and poems that have a familiar structure can create a supportive context for learning about the writing process, building students' background knowledge, and scaffolding their creation of original stories. In this lesson for students in second or late first grade, teachers help students explore the concepts of beginning, middle, and ending by reading a variety of stories and charting the events on storyboards. As they retell the stories, students are encouraged to make use of sequencing words (first, so, then, next, after that, finally). A read-aloud of Once Upon a Golden Apple by Jean Little and Maggie De Vries introduces a discussion of the choices made by an author in constructing a plot. Starting with prewriting questions and a storyboard, students construct original stories, progressing from shared writing to guided writing; independent writing is also encouraged.
Students tell their life stories in this lesson about autobiographies based on family photographs.
The importance of reading aloud to children is an established tenet of reading instruction. This lesson supports the language development and reading comprehension of kindergarten through second graders. Through the use of the text talk strategy, students explain, develop, and expand story ideas. This lesson is designed to help students learn how to gain meaning from words that are taken out of their original context.