In this lesson, students practice writing strong paragraphs after reviewing some of the things that make for a strong body paragraph. Students work in small groups to add paragraphs to articles in newspapers or magazines.

In this lesson, students review techniques for writing strong literary analyses. Students take notes on the techniques, then practice by analyzing a passage from a literary work.

This lesson teaches students how to write an effective thesis statement. Students first discuss what makes a good thesis statement and what form they should take, then write thesis statements and evaluate each others' work.

In this lesson, students read an article and write a graded review of the article. Students choose an article on a library trip before following specific instructions to write a review of the article in question.

This lesson plan walks students through writing two types of introduction paragraphs for essays. Students also learn what not to do and practice writing introductions for various types of essays.

This lesson reviews the sentence types, then has students write sentences of a variety of structures in a paragraph and review what they write.

This lesson plan helps ease students into a unit on poetry. Students answer some preliminary questions to activate their prior knowledge of the topic before delving into a poetry anthology and discussing poems they find as a group.

In this lesson, students participate in a review activity for recently taught content. The activity is adaptable to whatever has been covered recently in class. Students work together to silently match up pre-distributed cards featuring terms or concepts that need review.

This lesson plan encourages students to examine point of view by writing an eyewitness account. This lesson plan can be used with any novel the students might happen to be reading - students choose a character from whose perspective they'd be interested in examining things.

In this lesson, students learn the details about when and how to use semicolons, then practice the skills on sentence strips.

In this lesson, students take on the challenge of teaching each other about literary terms. Students are assigned terms for which they design posters which are passed between students to share their information with their classmates.

This lesson encourages students to justify their thoughts about literature by prompting them with ambiguous test questions. Students take the test without understanding that questions are intentionally unclear, then justify their answers with textual citations for credit.

In this lesson, students gain background information on the author of Lord of the Flies, William Golding. Students complete a webquest that has them research on the William Golding home page to learn about the novelist before they read.

In this lesson, students learn about the differences between inference and prediction, then review some strategies for making both. Students then create a chart to help them make inferences and predictions as they read.

This lesson allows students to use an out-of-the-box informational text - coverage of college basketball statistics and games - and use it to practice reading for information. Students look at information about local teams, interpret graphs and charts, and answer questions with similar stems to those seen on standardized tests.

In this activity, students complete an online scavenger hunt to discover information about famous American author Mark Twain. Three websites are provided from which the students might gather the required information.

This lesson uses a chart and shows three ways to use prediction-making to supplement the reading process. Students use the chart to make predictions either before, during, or after reading.

After students have been introduced to metaphors, this lesson plan keeps them in practice by identifying and analyzing the use of metaphors in poetry.

This lesson teaches students about pronoun-antecedent agreement. Students work with a draft of their own writing to correct mistakes with agreement in their own writing.

In this lesson, students work in groups to become masters of specific elements of proofreading and revision. Then, groups are reformed so that each group contains one of each expert, allowing the new groups to revise each others' essays one element at a time.