As part of the introduction to Edward Bloor's Tangerine, class members generate a KWHL chart listing what they know, what they want find out, how they plan to find this information, and what they have learned or still want to learn.

The anticipation guide for Words by Heart is the first of a series of six, contains lesson plans for the activity as well as a handout to be completed individually, in pairs, or as a class. It sparks interest for the text...

Readers of To Kill a Mockingbird summarize events, identify characters, and analyze actions in the first 11 chapters of Harper Lee’s novel. The carefully crafted questions could be used to guide reading or as the basis of group or...

A great support for teachers, this study guide provides several short answer comprehension questions, vocabulary words, and a longer response enrichment question for every chapter of the novel Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt. Use as...

Clarify transition words with a two quick exercises. For the first, individuals choose the correct transition word for five sentences and determine what the transitions express within each sentence. For the second, class members read...

Scanning a text before getting started is a reading strategy that your pupils can use to get a general idea about a text before diving in. Give some direction to their scanning with a worksheet that includes items to check for and space...

Prior to an in-class reading of "What Sally Said" and"Red Clowns," two vignettes from Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, class members complete an anticipation guide that asks them to agree or disagree with a series of...

What is and what will be the role of newspapers in the future? Keeping this essential question in mind, class members use print, electronic, and/or web editions of newspapers, to investigate topics that include financial...

Before you begin a unit on Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons, introduce class members to the literary themes of the book with an anticipation guide. As they read through ten sentences that address different aspects of the plot,...

The most famous climbers of Mount Everest could never have made it to the summit without the assistance of the local Sherpa. Christine Taylor-Butler's nonfiction children's book Sacred Mountain: Everest is the focus of an extensive...

Scholars take a popular song or nursery rhyme and make it their own as they write a fractured nursery rhyme. Writers seek out a nursery rhyme's rhyming words and change them to create an original poem.  

Examine the results of recent opinion polls on where people stand on the issue of the death penalty. In groups, middle schoolers examine various cases dealing with this issue and discuss the judgments. They write their own argument for...

Should organized prayer be prohibited at high school sporting events? Students explore their own feelings about prayer in school-sponsored events, before discussing the recent Supreme Court decision banning public prayer at high school...

Students read one of the following books: Minn of the Mississippi, Paddle-to-the-Sea, or Seabird, all by Holling C. Holling, and identify the five themes of geography as well as make a literature journal with chapter field notes. They...

Study unusual punctuation marks in this punctuation lesson. Young grammarians work in small groups to research one of the unusual punctuation marks (semi-colon, colon, dash, comma, ellipses, or quotation marks) and discuss how the mark...

After choosing a figure from Greek mythology, middle schoolers design, draw, and color a constellation to represent that person.  Additionally, they create a story to tell how the constellation came to be. This lesson plan is a...