This activity emphasizes the importance of teaching reading and writing strategies for students to use with informational text.

Cashiers, NC artist Wesley Wofford created a statue titled “Journey to Freedom” in honor of Harriet Tubman as a private commission. Wofford’s artist’s copy of this work was dedicated in Sylva, NC in September 2021 as part of a traveling tour. Students view this work in detail and reflect on four themes Wofford’s piece embodies: determination, protection, fear, and trust.

The highwayman is an eighteenth century thief, who promises to return to his love Bess, the landlord’s daughter. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this poetry session, students learn that shapes don’t have to be silent, and poetry doesn’t have to be linear, as they write shapes in verse, and verse in shapes. This lesson bridges the gap between poetry and math!

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 lesson, students learn about archetypes and spend time analyzing their use in both traditional and modern stories.

In this activity students will first brainstorm all the terms (vocabulary) they can think of related to electricity. Next, they will work collaboratively in groups to try to define these terms. Then in groups they will create word webs drawing correlations between the various terms. Groups will discuss how light bulbs work, how they light up, write down their ideas. Next, students will try to draw what they believe a circuit is and how it works. They will need to write several sentences concerning their thoughts. Then they will be given a battery, wires and a light bulb and asked to check their designs. Students will explore what they believe series and parallel circuits are, write down their ideas and draw some pictures. They then will be given materials to try and create these circuits. Finally, students will predict and test differences in bulb brightness in a variety of series and parallel circuits.

Students can improve their comprehension of content area textbooks by summarizing chapters in the form of magazine covers. This lesson begins by asking students to examine a magazine and discuss the ways in which the magazine cover's headlines and graphics express the main ideas of its articles. They then review a chapter in a content area textbook and use an interactive tool to create a magazine cover that summarizes the textbook information. This process enables students to form connections and create visual representations to share information. Although the focus is on informational texts, this assignment could potentially be expanded to include other types of text as well.

In this lesson, students participate in learning clubs, a grouping system used to organize active learning events based on student-selected areas of interest. Guided by the teacher, students select content area topics and draw on multiple texts—including websites, printed material, video, and music—to investigate their topics. Students then have the opportunity to share their learning using similar media, such as learning blogs.

The lesson, which focuses on vocal renderings of poems, will encourage students to discerning meaning through tone of voice, inflection and context.

In this lesson, students recognize loaded words when reading and purposefully use them in persuasive writing.

In this lesson, a three-pronged approach is used to help students create mental images while reading. The first approach develops schemata (prior knowledge) and visual awareness (the understanding and interpretation of visual images) by introducing content-related picture books and having students respond to the illustrations using a series of question prompts. The next approach capitalizes on existing visual comprehension using a strategy called Watch-Read-Watch-Read (W-R-W-R), where video clips build background knowledge and assist students in developing "memory pegs" as they read. Finally, students use a strategy similar to the think-aloud approach, creating drawings to illustrate and understand relevant information gleaned from print.

In this unit students practice writing to an essential question, using context clues and root words to determine word meaning, close reading with the aid of a glossary, taking notes with graphic organizers, re-reading to answer text dependent questions; and summarizing.

What should a good narrative contain? For this lesson, a mystery, a type of narrative realistic fiction, will be composed. Since strong adjectives and adverbs will support a mystery, they will be incorporated into the writing.

Improve student vocabulary with this large collection of student NYT crossword puzzles with answer keys. Search by topics including Black History Month, The Declaration of Independence, The Great Depression,
The Cold War, The Great Recession, American Labor History, Hispanic Heritage, The Pilgrims and much, much more.

Batter up! Studies show that using topics from popular culture in the classroom motivates students to read and write. This lesson, which can also be adapted for other topics, encourages students to look critically at trivia questions before writing their own. Students begin by listening to a read-aloud of Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man by David A. Adler and visiting websites containing baseball facts. Using the information they discover, students write questions to include in a Jeopardy game PowerPoint template. Playing the game with classmates enables students to share the facts they have discovered and creates a cooperative atmosphere in the classroom.

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.

Possible Sentences is a pre-reading vocabulary strategy that activates students' prior knowledge about content area vocabulary and concepts. Before reading, students are provided a short list of vocabulary words from their reading, which they group and eventually use to create meaningful sentences. After reading, students check to see if their "possible sentences" were accurate or need revising.

The students will read and reread the passage closely, and focusing their reading through either a series of questions and discussion about the text or the structured journal approach outlined here, students will come away with a working knowledge of the digestive system, its parts, and how they function together.

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.