Students work in small groups to examine Margaret Atwood's use of and observations about language in The Handmaid's Tale. Through this activity, students discover and articulate overarching thematic trends in the book and then can extend their observations about official or political language to examples from their own world.

This lesson asks students to analyze the features of a poet's work then create their own poems based on the original model.

In this lesson, students use blogs to hold discussions about the effect of the factors of culture, history, and environment on Latino poetry.

This lesson introduces Family Message Journals - a teacher-tested tool for encouraging family involvement and supporting writing to reflect and to learn.

Students examine great leads in children's literature before writing or revising a lead in their own writing.

Students examine leads in existing texts and create alternative leads for them before revising leads in their own writing.

Students across the board will get a kick out of researching a historical figure from the American Revolution to create an acrostic poem.

Using text from Doreen Cronin's Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type as shared readings, first-grade students learn word families and how to decode new words in a word family.

Students participate in learning clubs, select content area topics, and draw on texts - including websites, printed material, video, and music - to investigate their topics, and share their learning using similar media.

Students sing a popular children's song, follow along with a picture book that contains the lyrics and illustrations, and then participate in activities to reinforce learning of the vocabulary words.

Modeled on the activities in "Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster," a picture book, students combine vocabulary exploration with word play by planning their own vocabulary parade.

Students learn about organic gardening by developing their own research questions, conducting research, gardening at their school, creating signs about their plants, and presenting their research to the class.

Help Spanish-speaking English-language learners unlock the mysteries of their new language by using a bilingual book to recognize unfamiliar words and construct meaning from the text.

The Letter Generator is a useful tool for students to learn the parts of a business or friendly letter and then compose and print letters for both styles of correspondence.

The Letter Poem Creator provides an online model for the thought process involved in creating poems based upon a letter; then, students are invited to experiment with letter poems independently.

Students explore letter poems and experiment with writing letters as poems, using the placement of line breaks to enhance rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance.

Using their prior knowledge of books containing letters, students show their understanding of genre by rewriting a story and reflecting on how traditional stories differs from stories told in letters.

This lesson invites students to create a "Driver's License" for characters that have made a contribution to western expansion in the United States.

After students have read a book about the Holocaust, such as "The Diary of Anne Frank" or "Night" by Elie Wiesel, students will view "Life is Beautiful" and complete discussion questions to challenge their ability to analyze literature using film.

Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.