In this lesson, students use inquiry to choose a topic for an essay. Students start with a general topic, then develop lines of questioning leading them to specific questions they want to answer with an essay.

Creating Facebook-like presentations via Microsoft PowerPoint will engage and motivate students to learn about famous people of the American Revolution. To gain background knowledge prior to their study of the Revolutionary War, students will research people who played an important role during this time period. While sharing their research in their PowerPoint presentations, students provide written feedback.

Students will learn about characters and their traits. Using graphic organizers and video clips, students will be able to determine character traits and the main idea of a text.

This lesson gives students the information they need to practice writing great introductions for essays and other academic writing assignments.

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, students go step-by-step through the process of writing an effective cause-and-effect essay. Students first take notes on what a strong cause-and-effect essay should do, then begin to write.

In this lesson, students learn what makes a strong topic sentence in writing, then practice writing their own topic sentences.