To facilitate students' thinking and problem-solving skills, this lesson tasks students with turning a plot scaffold into a written narrative. Students learn kinesthetically by acting out the scaffold "script" while collaborating with others to determine character motivations and dialogue. Students transition from actors to writers by having mental conversations with the characters they have created and letting their characters dictate how the story will evolve. Students are also prompted to insert imagery and use proper grammar in their written narrative.

In this lesson, students will use a weekly poem to explore meaning, sentence structure, rhyming words, sight words, vocabulary, and print concepts. After studying the poem, students are given a copy of the poem to illustrate and share their understanding. All of the poems explored are then compiled into a poetry portfolio for students to take home and share with their families. To further connect home to school, a family poetry project is suggested.

In this lesson, students share their personal definition of poetry and challenge and revise that definition as they read poems from selected authors. In addition to reading poetry, students listen to poems to examine how the sounds of language are used to create meaning and mood. Students then write their own nonsense poem using common poetic devices, such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance. Finally, students write a descriptive poem, share their poem with the class, and write a reflection of their experience.

In this lesson, students have the opportunity to deepen and refine their understanding of prepositions, including some of the more confusing standard usage guidelines, while enjoying the vivid pictures of Ruth Heller. After reading Behind the Mask, students discuss the book, focusing on the use of prepositions in the text. Taking those experiences as a reader, students continue to engage with the prepositions by composing prepositional poems, modeled on the text of Behind the Mask. To conclude the project, students create study guides that demonstrate their more advanced understanding of prepositions.

Students can practice their speaking skills in a lower stakes situtation. Additionally, they are exposed to another skill for their technology toolbox. For this lesson students examine the differences between physical and chemical changes. After understanding these changes, in small groups students follow instructions for making popcorn, photographing each step. Then students create a video using the SonicPics app to narrate their photos and answer questions about this change.

This lesson uses the postmodern picture book Black and White, by David Macaulay, to engage students in a deep analysis of writer's craft. Macaulay's book presents four separate story lines that playfully interact with one another throughout the text. Students explore ways in which authors use words and illustrations to create unexpected plots and connections within a text.

Read-alouds of The Story of Lightning and Thunder (a Nigerian tale) and The Story of the Milky Way: A Cherokee Tale introduce the concept of a pourquoi tale, a folk tale that explains how or why something came to exist. Background information on the Nigerian and Cherokee cultures (assembled by the teacher from the listed websites) sets the stage for discussion of how beliefs and customs might influence the narrative and the moral of a story. The class works together to outline the key elements of pourquoi stories, and students read and analyze an additional story using the Pourquoi Reading Worksheet. Working in cooperative groups, students then use these stories as a framework on which to write their own pourquoi tales. Final production is either a skit or illustrated narration of each group's story. If these books are not available, other folktale books will substitute and the lesson can be adapted.

In this unit, students will develop an understanding of nonfiction through peer interaction and hands-on experiences with books. They use graphic organizers to record their thinking and new learning.

This lesson can be used after the reading of Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis. The lesson encourages students to use higher level thinking skills and asks them to examine different character perspectives. Students demonstrate comprehension of the story by actively involving themselves in group and whole-class discussions. Information about the author contributes to their understanding of historical fiction. By further analyzing the characters in preparation for a class "press conference," students can better understand the characters' impact in the story. The development and responses to critical-thinking questions lead to deeper understanding of the story.

In this lesson, students write reviews for popular retail website Amazon.com in order to develop their reading, critical thinking, and persuasive writing skills. Students will employ the writing process after reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman's, "The Yellow Wallpaper," to create their own published reviews of the story.

This lesson is designed to assist students through multiple sessions with identifying relevant propaganda techniques in literature, discussing persuasive elements found in print and non-print media and composing a persuasive essay. Lesson is appropriate for use with a provided list of novels to include Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

In this lesson, students learn about proverbs: how they work, how they differ from cliches, how to interpret them, and how they can be culturally and personally significant. Students begin by talking about proverbs, interview family and friends to find proverbs that were not discussed in class, and figuring out the meaning of proverbs by creating a new definition of proverbs based on what they've learned.

In this lesson, students work with proverbs from home and from around the world, exploring how these maxims are tied to a culture’s values and everyday experience. Students first discuss how proverbs convey cultural knowledge and values, as well as how proverbs from other cultures are similar to and different from American proverbs. Next, students share family proverbs and explain their significance. Finally, they select one or two proverbs and use art materials, PowerPoint, or a word processor to create mini-posters that reflect the culture from which the proverbs originated.

In this lesson, students examine and discern the writing structure of various alphabet books and improve their writing skills by creating an alphabet book using one of the structures examined.

In this lesson, students make the connection that the words sung in a song are part of a book that can be read. They explore this connection through children's song storybooks and interactive websites. Students complete a project by writing new lyrics to a familiar song and creating illustrations related to the lyrics. During the lesson students engage in various levels of reading and writing activities.

In this lesson, students will demonstrate an understanding of the characters, setting, and plot in the story by creating costumes, props, and sets for a Readers Theatre performance.

In this lesson, students learn to use the 3-2-1 strategy, which involves writing about three things they discovered, two things they found interesting, and one question they still have. After teacher modeling, students read a magazine article, independentl, and use the 3-2-1 strategy to comprehend what they read.

In this lesson, students learn inductively and experientially that moving-image media texts such as movies and TV shows employ a visual language. Additionally, students will analyze and evaluate how "authors" of film and TV media texts construct narratives by selecting from, and combining as needed, particular techniques and conventions.

In this lesson, students will analyze an excerpt from Mary Rowlandson's The Captive: The True Story Of The Captivity Of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Among The Indians. They then compare an excerpt of Shakespeare's The Tempest with Aimé Césaire's A Tempest in order to facilitate a postcolonial reading of Shakespeare. Students will arrive at an understanding of "the other" and will consider how canonical literature may position white characters in relation to those of different ethnicities.