Students will create a travel brochure for either their home town or a city they would love to visit or move to as soon as possible. This activity will help them learn to research and document information in appropriate spaces.

In this lesson, students will draft a comic book script based on a general prompt (e.g., A super hero saves the day!) and explore basic information about comics and comic book writing. Then, based on the detail and description in the script, students will create the page layout and images of a peer's comic book script. Next, students edit the first drafts of their scripts upon seeing how well the artists were able to match their visuals with the visions the writers had in their head as they initially composed the script. Last, students will share their revised scripts with classmates and discuss how the drafts differed.

In this activity, students research a decade in their school’s history. Within each group, students take on specific roles such as archivist, manager, techie, or researcher. Students become active archivists, gathering photos, artifacts, interviews, and stories for a museum exhibit that highlights one decade in their school’s history. The final project can be shared and displayed in your classroom, in the school auditorium or in the library.

In this activity, students create their own personal inferno journeys that reflects a real-life situation they may have faced or might face, that highlights a time where guidance might be needed to reach a better understanding.

In this lesson, teachers scaffold student reading of websites that highlight science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. Before choosing a text for close reading, the teacher models how to "read" the variety of texts and features of different websites, including images and interactives. Then the teacher models a close reading with students, setting a purpose and asking text-dependent questions to help students find evidence, use inferencing skills, and peer edit.

In this lesson students view examples of applealing blogs, learn the basic elements of blog creation, and then create a blog from the perspective of a fictional character. Students demonstrate their understanding of the text by including images, quotations, links, and commentary on their blogs. Students then help one another develop their blogs by acting as editiors during the creation stage and reviewing one another's blogs upon completion.

In this lesson, students explore their creativity by outlining and writing the first chapter for a children's book. Students first read and discuss the tone of the beginning of a famous children's book before creating ideas and sharing them with the class.

In this lesson plan, students practice the important task of determining audience and purpose for their writing. Students work in groups to write for a randomly assigned audience and purpose, adjusting their writing as necessary for the given combination.

To get students writing about context, which can be tricky, these writing frames set up the basic premise for answering the prompt posed.  Every student gets a frame, so no one can look around and determine who the higher or lower-level student is.  This helps students begin to understand and respond to the significance context makes in a text.

Students will read and analyze sonnets to discover their traditonal forms. Students will chart the poems' characteristics, including the poetic features and their emtional responses to the poems. Then they review the details for similarities, deducing traditional sonnet forms that the poems have in common. After this introduction, students write original sonnets, using one of the poems they have analyzed as a model.

In this lesson, students will analyze examples of contemporary youth poetry and the poetry of Langston Hughes to determine how a writer's environment influences his or her writing. Students will then work in groups to conduct research on how events in the world shaped Hughes's work. In a group presentation to the class, students will cite specific examples that link their interpretation of the poem to the sociohistorical context in which it was written. The lesson culminates with each student creating an original poem that communicates a personal view on a current world issue.

In this lesson, students discuss and develop essay ideas for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Students also learn about the writing process.

This tutorial focuses on the most common grammatical mistakes made in writing. The mistakes are organized under 13 grammatical categories. In each of these categories, the tutorial presents an error, explains it, and shows ways of avoiding or correcting it. Use the examples and explanations in this section as reminders when you proofread and edit your written work.

In this lesson, students will learn about seven of Egypt's most famous pharaohs. They will discuss leadership styles and draw conclusions about the success of each of these pharaohs. After learning about the personality and life of each pharaoh, students will break into groups to create in-depth projects about one of the seven pharaohs they have learned about and will teach others in the class about this leader. *This lesson is #4 in Egypt's Golden Empire.

In this lesson students explore ekphrasis, writing inspired through art. Through discussion poems inspired by works of art, students examine ways in which poets can approach a piece of artwork. Students then research piece of art that inspires them and in turn, compose a booklet of poems about the pieces they have chosen.

A collection of rubrics for editing and writing essays including persuasive, narrative, and research writings.

The Exit-Slip strategy requires students to write responses to questions you pose at the end of class. Exit Slips help students reflect on what they have learned and express what or how they are thinking about the new information. Exit Slips easily incorporate writing into your content area classroom and require students to think critically.

This resource provides a lesson that tasks high school students with assisting elementary level students to gain a deeper understanding of the expeditions of Lewis and Clark. The lesson is framed around the work, How We Crossed the West. As a culminating activity, the elementary students will produce a festival to prove what they have learned to the high school students.

All Quiet on the Western Front ends with a startling and ironic conclusion. This ending introduces students to situational irony. After discussing the definition and several examples of situational irony, students explore the novel’s concluding passage. Students next choose a possible alternate ending for the book that could still be an example of situational irony. They then retitle the book and rewrite its ending, maintaining the original ironic tone and weaving their new title into the ending as Remarque does. Finally, students design new, symbolic covers for the book, which feature their new titles.

This lesson will help students identify the various uses of language and understand their appropriateness within context. Students participate in journal writing as well as writing literacy narratives describing multiple uses of language. The lesson is designed to accompany a ready of "Mother Tongue"; however, the lesson may be used in conjunction with a study of other writings in English by authors who write or speak English as a second language.