This lesson helps students improve their writing abilities and their attention to details while experiencing a new technology called Descriptive Video. Also known as described programming, Descriptive Video refers to programming with an additional audio track that narrates a film’s visual elements. Students watch the opening scene of the standard version of the Disney film, The Lion King, and write a description of it. They then watch the same opening scene with the descriptions and captions available online at the National Center for Accessible Media. They will write another descriptive summary on this scene. Students share their two writing samples aloud and compare their pre- and post-audio descriptions.

Students can improve their comprehension of content area textbooks by summarizing chapters in the form of magazine covers. This lesson begins by asking students to examine a magazine and discuss the ways in which the magazine cover's headlines and graphics express the main ideas of its articles. They then review a chapter in a content area textbook and use an interactive tool to create a magazine cover that summarizes the textbook information. This process enables students to form connections and create visual representations to share information. Although the focus is on informational texts, this assignment could potentially be expanded to include other types of text as well.

Batter up! Studies show that using topics from popular culture in the classroom motivates students to read and write. This lesson, which can also be adapted for other topics, encourages students to look critically at trivia questions before writing their own. Students begin by listening to a read-aloud of Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man by David A. Adler and visiting websites containing baseball facts. Using the information they discover, students write questions to include in a Jeopardy game PowerPoint template. Playing the game with classmates enables students to share the facts they have discovered and creates a cooperative atmosphere in the classroom.

This lesson encourages students to use common Greek and Latin affixes and roots to deconstruct and construct words. If they learn, for example, that micro means small and scope means see, they can deduce that a microscope is a device that enables an individual to see small objects. The students use the Morpheme Match-Ups handout and the Word Central website to engage in morphemic analysis of familiar and unfamiliar words. This lesson allows teachers to easily substitute their own affixes and roots for each activity.

This lesson uses predictable text and a repetitive format to help students learn high-frequency words. Students develop fluency as they participate in a choral reading of the predictable text.

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.