Creating a story is not an easy task. What should I write about? Who will the characters be in my story? What will happen? These are all questions that every author needs to answer before their story can take shape. Storybird is an online community that provides original artwork to inspire students. The artwork sparks their imagination and supports story creation. Collaboration can take place when students invite others to work on their story with them.

This curriculum guide covers six works of Laurie Halse Anderson (Chains, Forge, Ashes, Fever 1793, Independent Dames: What You Never Knew About the Women and Girls of the American Revolution, and Thank You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving), and contains discussion prompts, key vocabulary terms, and ideas for assignments and activities related to each book.

In 5th grade, students can begin researching and interviewing others on topics for a weekly or monthly newsletter for the school. The students will learn interviewing techniques as well as become better writers.

Experiencing the language of great poets provides a rich learning context for students, giving them access to the best examples of how words can be arranged in unique ways. By studying the works of renowned poets across cultures and histories, students extract knowledge about figurative language and poetic devices from masters of the craft. In this lesson, students learn about personification by reading and discussing poems that feature this writing device. Then they use the poems as a guide to brainstorm lists of nouns and verbs that they randomly arrange to create personification in their own poems.

The following unit incorporates multimedia and classroom activities to encourage students to explore and interact with poetry by first writing letters to important historical poets as practice for writing letters to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors, a group that represents poetry in America at its best.

This lesson helps students improve their writing abilities and their attention to details while experiencing a new technology called Descriptive Video. Also known as described programming, Descriptive Video refers to programming with an additional audio track that narrates a film’s visual elements. Students watch the opening scene of the standard version of the Disney film, The Lion King, and write a description of it. They then watch the same opening scene with the descriptions and captions available online at the National Center for Accessible Media. They will write another descriptive summary on this scene. Students share their two writing samples aloud and compare their pre- and post-audio descriptions.

Students will select their own readings and write short reports about them, they will present their readings and reports in small groups and then, to the class showing presentation skills, such as eye contact, oral fluency, and posture. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.

This article includes a menu of post-reading activities for use with any nonfiction text. Students spend $50 on their choice of activities.

In this problem-based learning module, students will investigate why is it important that students be careful what is posted for everyone to see. Students will investigate and discuss these questions during this module that directly relate to their daily life. Students will work cooperatively in groups to design an infomercial to be presented to elementary students and/or parents and community members. Key Learning Targets: I can use technology to produce and publish my work, and link to sources. I can include multimedia projects or visual displays when they will be helpful in clarifying and emphasizing information. I can actively participate and contribute to a discussion with my teacher and my peers. I can present my findings to a group or audience in a clear and concise way. I can create a storyboard to prepare a public service announcement. I can compare contrast trends of technology. I can write an explanatory paragraph to examine a topic (present and future digital footprint).

Students will research about events from the world and home country a year in the past, they will make predictions about the same events a year in the future and give a presentation to the class as a whole. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.

This interactive unit encourages students to evaluate the effect of the inclusion of figurative langauge in Amy Tan's nonfiction narrative essay Fish Cheeks paired with the poem Face It by Janet Wong. This lesson will assist students in understanding the power of language. Students will be compelled to write by the conclusion of this lesson.

In this lesson, the students will get practice in reading and writing habits that they have been working with throughout the curriculum, in this case using poetry.

As a way to support teachers with English Language Arts (ELA) instruction during the pandemic, the NCDPI ELA team created choice boards featuring standards-aligned ELA activities.The intended purpose of these choice boards is to provide a way for students to continue standards-based learning while schools are closed. Each activity can be adapted and modified to be completed with or without the use of digital tools. Many activities can also be repeated with different texts. These standards-based activities are meant to be a low-stress approach to reinforcing and enriching the skills learned during the 2019-2020 school year. The choice boards are to be used flexibly by teachers, parents, and students in order to meet the unique needs of each learner.Exploration activities are provided for a more self-directed or guided approach to independent learning for students. These activities and sites should be used as a way to explore concepts, topics, skills, and social and emotional competencies that interest the learner. 

This article assembles free resources from the Earth's Changing Surface issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears cyberzine into a unit outline based on the 5E learning cycle framework. Outlines are provided for Grades K-2 and 3-5.

This lesson helps students explore the elements of poetry and their effect on meaning, tone, and style. Students also analye various forms of poetry both in pairs and independently and create their own poems and presentation slide show to show how to analyze poetic elements within their writing.

This article assembles free resources from the Energy and the Polar Environment issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears cyberzine into a unit outline based on the 5E learning cycle framework. Outlines are provided for Grades K-2 and 3-5.

The 11th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 11th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Students move from learning the class rituals and routines and genre features of argument writing in Unit 11.1 to learning about narrative and informational genres in Unit 11.2: The American Short Story. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.