This resource accompanies our Rethink 5th Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

This teachers guide for Searching for Silverheels by Jeannie Mobley includes a prereading activity, discussion questions, and writing and research activities for after reading.

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.

In this lesson, students will learn the reasons for the Stamp Act, the colonists' reactions to the Stamp Act, and the impact of the Stamp Act on the pocketbooks of American colonists. Students will organize their thoughts into a three-paragraph essay in which they address the reasons for, opposition to, and impact of the Stamp Act. These essays should include direct references and quotations from the primary sources as support for their arguments.

In this lesson, students explore how to write from an object’s perspective. The teacher uses a picture book, Dear Mrs. La Rue, to introduce the idea of writing from a non-human’s perspective. A mini-lesson follows in which students work together to define the word "perspective." Students collaboratively write and share a short example of writing from a pencil sharpener’s perspective. Students ultimately write their own stories from an object’s perspective after reading the model story. This lesson takes multiple days as students prewrite, draft, revise, edit, and publish their stories.

In this lesson, students will learn about the Boston Tea Party, how taxes impact people's lives and where tax money goes. They will also understand the roles of the events leading up to the Declaration of Independence. As assessment, students will write a persuasive essay to either the colonists or the King explaining their point of view.

A teachers guide for five Jack Henry books by Jack Gantos (Jack Adrift, Jack on the Tracks, Heads or Tails, Jack's New Power, Jack's Black Book), including an activity to complete throughout reading, discussion questions for each book as well as questions to draw connections between themes, and ways to connect themes and key subjects in the books to other areas of education.

In this lesson, students write theme poems using their content knowledge and sensory awareness of a familiar object. Students first learn about the characteristics and format of a theme poem. They then engage in an online interactive activity in which they select a graphic of a familiar object (e.g., the sun, a heart, a balloon), build a word bank of content area and sensory words related to the object, and write poems within the shape of the object. Finished poems are printed and displayed in class.

In this multi-session lesson, word webs are used to expose students to synonyms for common words, to help students choose synonyms that are appropriate for a given context, and to encourage students to use more descriptive words in their speech and writing. Student pairs then use words from the web in a skit they present to the class.

In this lesson, students will develop skills for historical and geographical analysis, with regard to Virginia's central role in the Civil War, including the ability to: a) identify and interpret primary and secondary sources to understand events in history; b) determine cause and effect relationships; d) draw conclusions and make generalizations; f) sequence events in Virginia history; g) interpret ideas and event from different historical perspectives; h) evaluate and discuss issues orally and in writing; i) analyze and interpret maps to explain relationships among landforms, water features, climatic characteristics, and historical events.

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.

The "Wham" game is a fun way to teach students all about exclamatory sentences; which can also be used to review interjections.

In this lesson, literature and shared writing are used to teach letter-writing format and promote authentic letter writing. Students listen to and talk about stories dealing with correspondence before participating in a collaborative, whole-group letter-writing activity. They go on to write their own letters to deliver or mail to adult school helpers, family, or friends. Students often go on to write letters on their own time, which may generate ongoing correspondence.

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.