The student activites are inspired by Pablo Picasso's masterpiece entitled Guernica, which was an artistic expression resulting from the Spanish Civil War.This lesson supports third- through fifth-grade students as they apply think-aloud strategies to reading, as well as to the composition of artwork and poetry. Activities include collaborative as well as individual work. Technology tools are integrated as students research symbols of peace and as they prewrite, compose, and publish their poetry.

This resouce include an editable document of a Choice Board that can be used for students to create presentations at the conclusion of reading a piece of literature. The choice board provides customizable options for students to express their understanding of the literature read and to convey it creatively through digial means. The choice board can be used for whole class reading of the same text, small groups reading the same text, or for individual students reading different texts. The teacher has the flexibility to add to/delete/change the activities and the digital methods used by students to create their presentations.

Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919), also known as L. Frank Baum, was an American author, best known for his children’s books. Baum is the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. He wrote 14 novels in the Oz series. In this excerpt from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, Toto, and the Scarecrow meet the Tin Woodman. As students read, they take notes on how Dorothy reacts to meeting the Tin Woodman and why she reacts this way.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade ELA.

This resource accompanies our Rethink 3rd Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning.  

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade English Language Arts. 

This AIG extension task will be used as differentiation within a second grade dramatic literature unit. AIG students will be grouped to read an adapted version of Shakespeare's Macbeth and complete a character analysis task. This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

Pam Calvert is an award-winning children’s author and has written for Highlights. Calvert’s story is based on a legend from the Island of Guam, told by the original occupants of the island, the Chamorros. In the legend, a large fish threatens to eat the island. As students read, they take notes on how Nineti responds to the threat of the fish.

 In this lesson, students will be going through the Wonders Literature Anthology, reading “The Talented Clementine” and “Clementine and the Family Meeting”. Before reading the texts, students will review story elements by listening to the YouTube link posted below. The teacher and students will then go through reading the texts, pausing throughout reading to place sticky notes in their text to annotate the plot of the story (including setting, characterization and key events). Students will show their understanding by completing assignments in their reading/writing companion, and will then create a “Storyboard That” showing beginning, middle, and end of both texts for their formative assessment.

This writing activity for gifted learners might serve as a culminating activity or final assessment as part of a larger fiction-based genre study. Students will take part in close readings of a variety of fictional genres throughout the unit, such as parables, fables, folktales, fairy tales, myths, novels, and even poetry.  In this activity, gifted learners would work independently to close read The 13 Clocks by James Thurber. They will work to decipher the story and it’s genre, analyzing major components of the story (such as a central message, characters, setting, and/or events in the story) and evaluating those components by the various genre criteria they learned about in class and through their own online research.  This will culminate in an opinion piece arguing as to the genre of The 13 Clocks and potentially the creation of a new genre.  This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

In this lesson, the first session involves teacher modeling of the prediction strategy. The second is based on guided practice that allows the teacher and students to work together. The third session requires students to use prediction and document the results in response journals. Suggestions for transferring the strategy into later reading activities are included.

Mehded Maryam Sinclair has written for Highlights. In this folktale, Nasreddin Hodja wonders why watermelons and walnuts grow the way they do. Hodja’s character is a repeating figure in folktales from the Muslim world. As students read, they take notes on what happens to Hodja.

Students read various poems and explore why lines are broken where they are and how they affect rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance in poetry.

Students will read, discuss and write about the novel Wonder by RJ Palacio.

In this lesson, students get to flex their writing muscles as they use a variety of writing genres to create a zine of their own: letter writing, persuasive writing, narrative, acrostic poetry, comic writing, and biography/autobiography. Students choose a prominent figure from popular culture as the focus for a multigenre zine and then plan the project using the Facts–Questions–Interpretations method. Students then write in each of the listed genres about their chosen subjects, using a variety of ReadWriteThink.org tools. Finally, students design covers for their projects, and the teacher binds all the printed documents into individual zines.