This activity invites readers to compare the ways we communicate “from the road” by contrasting a handwritten letter with a blog post. Both describe a similar trip to the campus of the World’s Fair (now the Seattle Center), but do so on very different terms. What has been lost and gained as we move into digital communication?

In this lesson, students will use thematically related texts, organized from least to most complex, to gather a word bank of supporting details and content vocabulary about a concept. Then they use these words as a basis for writing acrostic poems, which support organization of information around a central idea, as the lines of an acrostic poem are held together by the topic or main idea spelled vertically.