In this lesson, students complete the Mid-Unit 3 Assessment Parts 1 and 2 using the concrete poem “Skateboard” from Technically, It’s Not My Fault and the news article “Councilman: Ban Skateboarding in Downtown Columbia.”
In this lesson, students participate in a Fishbowl Discussion as their End of Unit Assessment.
In this lesson, students build on work previously done with argument, claims, and evidence.
This activity emphasizes the importance of teaching reading and writing strategies for students to use with informational text.
In this lesson students are introduced to the myths and mythology through a close read of the text "Shrouded in Myth."
In this lesson students build background knowledge about mythology through a continued close read of the text "Shrouded in Myth."
In this lesson students begin to read the central text, The Lightning Thief and identify the narrator of the story.
In this lesson students practice drawing evidence from the text to infer about the main character and narrator, and use context clues to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.
In this lesson students begin to build background knowledge about the important archetype of the hero’s journey through reading an informational article.
In this lesson students continue their close read from the previous lesson to include background knowledge about the important archetype of the hero’s journey through reading an informational article; this time focusing on vocabulary.
Jigsaw is a strategy that emphasizes cooperative learning by providing students an opportunity to actively help each other build comprehension. Use this technique to assign students to reading groups composed of varying skill levels. Each group member is responsible for becoming an "expert" on one section of the assigned material and then "teaching" it to the other members of the team.
The following series of activities for the classroom allow students to explore and interact with poetry by writing letters to poets.
Students have read the novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and will compare and contrast the relationship of the blacks and whites in the 1930's to the relationship of blacks and whites in 2013.
In this lesson, students will use the individual experience of Mary McLeod Bethune to analyze choice, its affects on social equality, and impact on their own life experiences.
In this lesson students examine how imagery is used to represent ideas, themes, periods of history, and make cultural connections to poem, "Still I Rise." Students will reflect through written expression how resiliency is in their lives, school, and community.
Use literacy skills to make connections among those in your classroom with this lesson that focuses on building classroom community by sharing favorite texts with one another. In this lesson, the class explores environmental print then focuses specifically on a teacher-created display on a favorite book. After exploring the teacher’s display, students write about their own favorite book, genre, or author. Students then select one of several options for making a display of their favorite book to share with the class. After creating their own presentations, students share them with the class and complete peer- or self-assessments.
The Paragraph Shrinking strategy allows each student to take turns reading, pausing, and summarizing the main points of each paragraph. Students provide each other with feedback as a way to monitor comprehension.
Students will watch and discuss video clips that show how two men in Chile coped with being prisoners in concentration camps during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Each student will then create a non-fiction picture book that tells the story of one of these men and provides historical context.
Behind many of the apparently simple stories of Robert Frost's poems are unexpected questions and mysteries. In this lesson, students analyze what speakers include or omit from their narrative accounts, make inferences about speakers' motivations, and find evidence for their inferences in the words of the poem.
Power Notes is a strategy that teaches students an efficient form of organizing information from assigned text. This technique provides students a systematic way to look for relationships within material they are reading. Power Notes help visually display the differences between main ideas and supportive information in outline form. Main ideas or categories are assigned a power 1 rating. Details and examples are assigned power 2s, 3s, or 4s.