In this lesson, students choose two experiences or images from a given list and write about it using sensory details.
In this lesson, students listen to excerpts about a blind man's journey up Mt. Everest, then write a bio-poem about him.
Students work with primary documents and latter-day photographs to recapture the experience of traveling on the Oregon Trail.
The poem Oranges by Gary Soto is about the bittersweet experience of a first date. They walk together to the drug store and girl picks a chocolate that costs a dime. The boy offers to pay for the candy with a nickel and an orange. The boy takes the girl's hand and then releases it so she can unwrap her chocolate, and he can peel his orange. In the darkness of the winter day, the orange burns bright light a fire, much like the love in his heart. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.
In this lesson, after reading the novel Out of the Dust, students will create a free-verse poem about a treasure.
In this lesson, students read the novel "Out of the Dust" and create an autobiographical poem using figurative language.
In this lesson, students practice effective word choice, uses of dialect, and sensory or figurative language in poetry.
The text begins with a poor fisherman, Kino, his wife, Juana, their baby Coyotito, and the great pearl. When Coyotito is stung by a scorpion, Kino and Juana travel from their village to take him to the nearest doctor. However, they are unable to pay for treatment and are turned away. But once they have a large pearl in their possession, the greedy doctor makes a house call, hoping to get a share of the profits. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.
The PQP technique—Praise–Question–Polish—requires group members to take a turn reading their drafts aloud as the other students follow along with copies. This oral reading helps the writer to hear the piece in another voice and to identify possible changes independently.
In this lesson, students study personification in published works of poetry, then create their own.
In this lesson students study Alexander Gardner's photograph of Lincoln taken a little over two months before his death. They look for clues to Lincoln's personality and mood, read a short biography, write a poem describing what they learned about Lincoln, and create an artwork showing his character. They also learn about Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner and 19th century photographic processes.
In this lesson, students produce an art and writing project that introduces them to the concept that words define who we are.
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.
In this lesson, students will write narrative essays to demonstrate organizational patterns having a beginning, middle, end and transitional devices.
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.
Poets achieve popular acclaim only when they express clear and widely shared emotions with a forceful, distinctive, and memorable voice. But what is meant by voice in poetry, and what qualities have made the voice of Langston Hughes a favorite for so many people?
In this lesson, students learn about point of view by rewriting an existing narrative paragraph (using a different point-of-view). Students expand this knowledge by writing an expository paragraph, then rewriting it to reflect a different point-of-view.
In this lesson, students create autobiographies and publish them using word processing and computer graphics.
In this lesson, students write a poem made up of prepositional phrases.
This activity can be adapted among grade levels, and involves students practicing describing objects by their properties.