Per the ReadWriteThink website: In this collaborative inquiry unit, the real gold is the inquiry skills and content area knowledge that students develop. The class works in small groups, each focusing on one aspect of the same big topic, such as the Gold Rush. After skimming related texts, the class brainstorms people, places and things associated with the topic and develops a list of five or six main subtopics. Students then work in small groups to research one of the subtopics, practicing specific research skills as they work. Finally, students choose an activity, such as an oral report, trivia game, or newspaper, to teach what they have learned to the rest of the class. Group accountability and individual responsibility are built in to this lesson process. While this unit uses the Gold Rush as an example, any event or geographical area could be substituted.

After researching facts pertaining to a person/topic from the Reconstruction Era in American History, students will organize their facts to write a speech. Afterwards, students will create a character who will give the speech and share the speech through a multimedia presentation such as Power Point, Voki or other approved presentation media.

Students will play the role of newspaper reporters in order to research, write, and publish an article about the history of the Star-Spangled Banner. This is connected with the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.

This is an enrichment Tic Tac Toe that corresponds to 5th grade science (Weather and Natural Diasters) and ELA standards.

In this lesson, the whole class analyzes a photograph and brainstorms words to describe the characters' senses and feelings. A "hot-seating" drama session follows where classmates interview each other, acting as characters in the photograph, and further exploring the characters' feelings. Students are introduced to the idea of using similes and then work in pairs to describe a character's experience. They then create a simply structured poem using their ideas and similes.

In this lesson, students will use thematically related texts, organized from least to most complex, to gather a word bank of supporting details and content vocabulary about a concept. Then they use these words as a basis for writing acrostic poems, which support organization of information around a central idea, as the lines of an acrostic poem are held together by the topic or main idea spelled vertically.