An interactive activity that supports critical thinking and problem solving while also building students' comprehension and spelling skills. Students will complete puzzles based on popular children's books.

In this lesson, students visit library websites from a variety of places, including Hong Kong, Kenya, and Scotland, to develop a global perspective and a broader understanding of the types of library services available throughout the world. They discuss services offered in their community and then form questions regarding the availability of library services in other parts of the world. Working in groups, students access library websites to answer teacher- and student-generated questions. When they have completed their research, students share their findings with classmates and compare the services available in distant libraries to their local services.

In this lesson, students will pair reading and discussion of Tim O'Brien's story "The Things they Carried" with a letter-writing activity intended to help students analyze text to identify figurative and connotative meaning as well as ultimately organize and create their own piece of prose.

In this lesson, beginning writers use electronic communication as a tool for literacy learning. E-mail is well-suited to teaching audience awareness—recognizing what readers need to know to understand a reply message and using the reply function as a way to contextualize a reply and help readers make sense of it. Although the lesson states K-2 for appropriate grades, it can be used for grades 3-5.

This lesson plan, which is adaptable for use in middle school as well, introduces students to a wide world of writing. Students begin by brainstorming a list of the types of writing people do on a daily basis. Then, students work together to classify those writing genres in various categories, such as formal and informal, public and private, and digital writing. Students then invite people into the classroom to talk about what, why, and how they write in real life. As a culminating activity, students reflect on how these varying purposes and processes can apply to their own lives.

In this lesson, students explore their text, searching for literary elements such as characters, setting, figures of speech, and themes. They use the alphabet to organize their findings. Finally, they publish their work in ABC books, using the Alphabet Organizer student interactive.

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.

In this lesson, students are first introduced to a variety of books using rebus writing. They then brainstorm lists of rhyming words that they could use in their own rebus poems. Finally, students create their own rebus poems and share them with an audience.

In this lesson students will learn to write and analyze technical writing instructiuons with consideration to audience, purpose, context, length, and complexity using common household items. After writing their own instructions, students will conduct usability tests of each other’s instructions, providing user feedback. Finally, students use this user feedback to revise their instructions before publishing them.

In this lesson asks students to reflect on their writing process, and helps the teacher learn more about students' habits and techniques as writers. Students begin by reading and analyzing the poem "The Writer" by Richard Wilbur, particularly discussing the use of extended metaphor. Students then reflect on their own writing habits, compare themselves as writers to the writer in the poem, and brainstorm possible metaphors for themselves as writers.

In this lesson, students will conduct interviews of friends and family members, as well as online and library research on what was happening internationally, nationally, locally, in sports, music, arts, commercial, TV, and publishing during the year that they were born. After they've gathered their research, they discuss how they will organize their information, typically in chronological order, and then create a rough outline. Students will then work in small groups to give feedback on their research and outlines. They then refine their outline into a paper that they publish as a newspaper or booklet using an online publishing tool.

In this lesson, students take on the role of the director of a movie. After exploring cinematic terms, students read a literary work with director's eyes. This lesson uses Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl as an example; however, the activities can be completed with any matched movie and piece of literature (e.g., any of the Harry Potter books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, or The Polar Express).

Students write about present-day pop culture as well as learning about pop culture of the past by using Cole Porter's song "You're the Top!" (1934) to touch on many issues relevant to a language arts classroom, especially the literary technique of cataloguing. After an introduction and context information about Porter's song, students listen to the song and examine the lyrics. They look at the list of the pop culture items referenced in the song to see what they feel is still valid today, brainstorm replacements for other items, and create revised lyrics for the song. They then present their updated lyrics to the class.

In this lesson, students get to flex their writing muscles as they use a variety of writing genres to create a zine of their own: letter writing, persuasive writing, narrative, acrostic poetry, comic writing, and biography/autobiography. Students choose a prominent figure from popular culture as the focus for a multigenre zine and then plan the project using the Facts–Questions–Interpretations method. Students then write in each of the listed genres about their chosen subjects, using a variety of ReadWriteThink.org tools. Finally, students design covers for their projects, and the teacher binds all the printed documents into individual zines.

In this multi-session lesson, students use computers or digital readers to read and respond to e-books. Students learn how to use e-book tools and features to support their reading processes. In particular, they insert digital notes into a book to record their thoughts and ideas in response to the text. Whole-class and small-group discussions about different types of responses encourage students to broaden their response repertoire. At the end of the lesson, students review their digital notes and fill out handouts that help them reflect on the value of the e-book reading experience and the subsequent response process.

Students make lists of their favorite and least favorite movies and brainstorm qualities that make a film good or bad. Next, students write a movie review for a film they have seen.

In this lesson, students will apply their knowledge of letters and letter sounds as they play games and interact with letters online, using what they see and learn to create their own ABC book.