Students will identify rhyming words; brainstorm rhyming words; create song verses; and practice rhyming using an online interactive tool.

In this lesson, students will identify how Common's rap song "A Dream" and Walter Dean Myers's short story "Monkeyman" reinterpret Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of nonviolence. Students will delve into a text-based discussion on characterization and conflict, as well as compose an essay on the Six Principles of Nonviolence (rubric available).

Paraphrasing helps students make connections with prior knowledge, demonstrate comprehension, and remember what they have read. Through careful explanation and thorough modeling by the teacher in this lesson, students learn to use paraphrasing to monitor their comprehension and acquire new information. They also realize that if they cannot paraphrase after reading, they need to go back and reread to clarify information. In pairs, students engage in guided practice so that they can learn to use the strategy independently. Students will need prompting and encouragement to use this strategy after the initial instruction is completed. The lesson can be extended to help students prepare to write reports about particular topics.

In this lesson, students will identify the literary elements of plot, theme, and character in a work and use indirect characterization and psychoanalytic criticism to analyze a character and explain how the character contributes to plot and theme. Final assessment inclues an analytical essay.

This lesson alerts students to the fallacies that surround them every day. In this lesson, students deconstruct fallacious images and messages in advertisements and demonstrate their understanding of the fallacies through multimedia presentations.

This resource provides a review lesson for the novel Catcher in the Rye. Students will spend time focusing on various technologies that were not available within the setting of the text. Students will create scenarios whereupon a given type of technology could have affected the story.

This lesson uses narrative structures to introduce students to one form of expository writing—news briefs and articles. By condensing a short story into a newspaper article and expanding an article into a short story, students will explore the ways that exposition differs from narration.

This resource provides a strategy explaining the writing process as well as practical methods to help students become proficient writers.

In this lesson, students will determine the meaning of new words using common Greek and Latin affixes and roots.

In this lesson, students practice analyzing word meanings by learning root words and affixes. They work in a variety of ways with a list of about 20 common but challenging words to learn the definition and spelling of each. Then students get in small groups to design and play the Make-a-Word card game, during which they must form complete words with three cards: a prefix, a root word, and a suffix.

In this lesson, the repetition, rhythm, and rhyme of Martin’s works provide opportunities for students to hear fluent reading modeled before participating in the readings through literary performance. The lesson provides students the chance to focus on their fluency and comprehension. The readers theater section of the lesson allows students to demonstrate these skills for an audience, while improving their literacy skills further.

This lesson uses a think-aloud procedure to model how to infer character traits and recognize a character's growth across a text. Students also consider the underlying reasons of why the character changed, supporting their ideas and inferences with evidence from the text.

This resource provides a strategy that enables students to create meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing.

In this lesson, students will read Laura Joffe Numeroff's 'If You Give a Mouse a Cookie' to combine word-skill work with prediction and sequencing practice. Students learn about cause-effect relationships during a shared reading of the book and then complete a cloze exercise that uses context and initial consonant clues. Students then create story circles that display the events of the story and use these circles to retell the story to a peer. Finally, the students compose their own stories featuring themselves in the role of the mouse.

Water covers 71% of the earth?s surface?does it get the instructional time it deserves in your busy curriculum? Students wade right in to the study of bodies of water as they read and discuss science trade books and work together to develop Readers Theater scripts based on selected titles.

Students will complete a word map for building vocabulary by following the eight perscribed steps. Students will also increase their retention of selected vocabulary by making a personal connection to each word. In addition, students will demonstrate internalization of vocabulary by writing an original sentence using the chosen word. Finally, students will generate a journal response by reflecting to this way of learning vocabulary words.

In this unit, paired students read background information about each other, plan and conduct initial and follow-up interviews, and write articles about each other Partners also write and exchange personal memoirs. Partners plan, propose, and take digital photographs that reveal each other’s personality and interests. Then they research the Internet for facts, lists, and illustrations that demonstrate their partners’ interests. All of this information is placed creatively on a poster or flyer, and each student presents his or her partner to the class. Students may use MS Publisher or readwritethink's "Printing Press" to publish their final project.

Concept Sorts can be used before reading to gather students’ prior knowledge about the upcoming content, or can be used after reading to assess students’ understanding of the concepts that were presented to them. Have students brainstorm a list of words from reading material or an upcoming unit, lesson, or text (sometimes the word list may need to be provided by the teacher). Students then discuss each word and place it in its correct category; categories can either be defined by the teacher or students.

This lesson provides an introduction to the language and poetics of the epic poem, "Beowulf." Although students read "Beowulf" in translation, they will be introduced to the five characters in the Old English alphabet no longer used. Students will translate a phrase from the Old English, listen to a passage read in Old English, then learn about poetic devices important in "Beowulf." Finally, students will compare the use of alliteration in Auden's poem, "The Age of Anxiety" to the alliteration and meter used in "Beowulf."