Most people read and understand better when reading print. Usually when we are online, we are jumping around from place to place. To read online and really understand, we need to slow down and really think about what we are reading. In this lesson, students practice strategies to help them read deeply online. These strategies are based on the article in the lesson resources: "Strategies to Help Students 'Go Deep' When Reading Digitally" by Katrina Schwartz.Teacher copies the text from an online article into a Google Doc and shares it with students. Students use the highlighting tool to mark the most challenging vocabulary words and use strategies to determine their meaning. Then they develop a main idea for a paragraph by choosing one, two, three, and finally four words that make up the main idea. They type this above the paragraph and use formatting tools to make it a heading. As they repeat this process with additional paragraphs they are developing a summary of the article in the document outline.

This story is about a dinosaur find in New Mexico and after many years of information, the paleontologist attempts to persuade the reader about what happened to kill the dinosaur. In order to do so the author gives many ideas and theories but by evaluating evidence, narrows it down to one. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

"The Dog of Pompeii" centers on a blind boy, Tito, and his dog, Bimbo, his life-long devoted companion during A.D. 79 in the city of Pompeii. Bimbo is crucial to Tito’s survival because and during the course of the story, a volcano erupts and causes mass panic and death. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In the Drive-In Movies, young Gary Soto wants his mother to take him and his siblings to the drive-in movies, a special treat. His plan is to be very good and to do lots of chores one Saturday morning and afternoon in order to impress his mother. Unfortunately, he works so hard at weeding, mowing, and waxing the car that he falls asleep during the movie. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

As a way to support teachers with English Language Arts (ELA) instruction during the pandemic, the NCDPI ELA team created choice boards featuring standards-aligned ELA activities.The intended purpose of these choice boards is to provide a way for students to continue standards-based learning while schools are closed. Each activity can be adapted and modified to be completed with or without the use of digital tools. Many activities can also be repeated with different texts. These standards-based activities are meant to be a low-stress approach to reinforcing and enriching the skills learned during the 2019-2020 school year. The choice boards are to be used flexibly by teachers, parents, and students in order to meet the unique needs of each learner.Exploration activities are provided for a more self-directed or guided approach to independent learning for students. These activities and sites should be used as a way to explore concepts, topics, skills, and social and emotional competencies that interest the learner. 

Rachel wakes up on her eleventh birthday feeling as if she’s still ten—and nine, and eight, and all the ages that came before and the day just gets worse from there. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

In this lesson, students will read the myth of Prometheus in order to analyze allusions in The Lightning Thief.

In this lesson, students analyze and discuss familiar superheroes and super-villains to expand their understanding of character types and conventions. Then students consider social issues that confront their everyday reality and respond by incorporating those issues into the creation of their own superheroes or super-villains as well as the settings the superheroes or super-villains operate in.

A short video on locating words in the dictionary that students are unable to spell.

A short video on locating words in the dictionary that students are unable to spell.

This lesson provides hands-on differentiated instruction by guiding students to search for the literal definitions of figurative language using the Internet. It also guides students in understanding figurative meanings through the use of context clues and making inferences.

This is an excerpt from "Tomb Robbers" a story based on Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, the first emperor of China. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this online activity, students flip two chips to mix and match four word parts and make four words. Students then insert the four words into a paragraph, using context clues to determine where each word belongs. After each exercise, students can print their work to check whether they placed the four words in the paragraph correctly.

This interactive lesson allows students the opportunity to fill in the blanks of a story with words created through a virtual flip of a chip. Students will use chips as tools for showing different affixes and roots that can be joined together to create words. The created words are inserted in a paragraph according to context clues. Students can work in pairs to create their own set of chips and corresponding paragraph. Students then exchange their packets to see whether the context clues are stong enough to enable classmates to fill in the blanks correctly.

In this lesson students do a close reading of “Learning to Read,” a poem by Francis Watkins Harper about an elderly former slave which conveys the value of literacy to blacks during and after slavery. The activities also prompt students to examine the nature of literacy in the 21st century and the value they put upon it.

Franklin R. Chang-Diaz is an immigrant from Costa Rica who began thinking about space at age seven when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space. After going through many obstacles he was accepted to NASA and became “the first Hispanic to be in the space program for the long run". In this CCSS lesson, students will explore his story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

The Frayer Model is a strategy that uses a graphic organizer for vocabulary building. This technique requires students to (1) define the target vocabulary words or concepts, and (2) apply this information by generating examples and non-examples. This information is placed on a chart that is divided into four sections to provide a visual representation for students.

This lesson capitalizes on a student's love of jokes to understand how word context and inference are used in everyday language to create humor.

In this lesson, students will listen to Steve Jobs’ section of the speech in order to find the gist and identify unfamiliar vocabulary in a short extract.

This lesson focuses on developing domain- specific vocabulary about mythology that students will use as they read, write, and engage in discussion across the unit.