All resources in Downingtown Area School District

Analyzing Visual Text

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In this lesson Students individually consider a visual text and draw conclusions based on what they see. They write about their conclusions and explain the evidence used to make that determination. Students will be able to analyze a visual text. Students will be able to develop and support a claim about the visual text based on evidence found in the text.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Literary Devices

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This lesson was designed for English 9 students as an introduction to literary devices at the beginning of a short stories unit. The ultimate goal will be that students can analyze a story, explaining how an author uses these devices to create literature, but this lesson specifically focuses on domain-specific vocabulary.

Material Type: Homework/Assignment, Lesson, Reading

And Then What Happened?

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Students will identify nouns, verbs, and adjectives visible in two paintings depicting a stormy and calm landscape, respectively. They will write a narrative inspired by the paintings, paying attention to transitional phrases and sensory details. Students will use color and line to create their own calm or stormy landscape.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Lesson Plan

7th grade poetry

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The 7th grade poetry unit gives an in depth approach to poetry involving the four strands within the core. I've included worksheets, rubrics, and answers keys where applicable. I have also used literature examples from the core.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

All About Me

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In this lesson plan, the traditional autobiography writing project is given a twist as students write alphabiographies—recording an event, person, object, or feeling associated with each letter of the alphabet. Students are introduced to the idea of the alphabiography through a presentation giving the instructions of how to create guidelines for writing their own alphabiographies. Students create an entry for each letter of the alphabet, writing about an important event from their lives. After the entry for each letter, students sum up the stories by writing the life lessons they learned from the events. Since this type of autobiography breaks out of chronological order, students can choose what has been important in their lives. And since the writing pieces are short, even reluctant writers are eager to write!

Material Type: Assessment

Author: Sylvia Castro

Animal Inquiry

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Supporting inquiry-based research projects, the Animal Inquiry interactive invites elementary students to explore animal facts and habitats using writing prompts to guide and record their findings.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Interactive

The Big Green Monster Teaches Phonics in Reading and Writing

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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.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Maureen Gerard