Have your older students assist young children with writing in this community service and literacy lesson. Middle schoolers become partners with a local elementary school. They assist the grade school children in writing a pattern book...

The fifth installment in a writing unit that culminates with a Hyperstudio illustrated group story project, this plan is ripe with ideas for ways to design group writing projects for elementary writers. Use the whole unit as a base from...

Think about a moment, frozen in time. Now take a critical look at the painting, Better, Homes, Better Gardens. This painting works to provide learners the opportunity to analyze art, critique artist's choices, and write a story inspired...

Explore informative and explanatory writing with this lesson plan. Using a cube labeled with directives to describe, analyze, compare, associate, apply, and argue the topic, middle schoolers work individually or in groups to answer...

Teach your upper graders how to use an idea web to develop a topic for writing. After reading a variety of stories about friendship (a list of stories with the theme of friendship is included), model using an idea web. Class members...

Art inspires art, as children work to understand artistic forms that come from the imagination. They analyze the installation piece, Fox Games and then discuss the design process. They then use clay to create imaginative dioramas,...

Get the word out about friendship, support, and a safe school community with a media literacy lesson about bullying. Young journalists investigate instances of bullying and take descriptive pictures as they compile a magazine to fight...

Encourage your young writers to thoughtfully plan and organize their work. First, model how this is done and vocalize your thought process as you work. Next, create a class list of strategies that they can use during independent writing...

Sixth graders investigate the constellations. In this constellations lesson, 6th graders discover where the constellations are located and the myth associated with them. Students create their own myth and make a slide show about stars...

Third through fifth graders discover the importance of reading and plan a service project to provide books to children. First, they read the book The Important Book and then they brainstorm about the importance of reading. Afterward,...

Dissect the parts of an advertisement with your class. Middle schoolers discuss advertisements and locate the hook in them. Then, they create an advertisement for a business, in which they include the name of the business, an...

Take a virtual trip to see other countries and cultures! After learning about different cultures and populations, English learners think about a place they'd like to visit. Small groups or individuals plan a trip to a country...

Interviewing skills are important, even outside of a news reporter's desk or employer's office. Take your class through the process of interviewing people they don't know with a set of case studies featuring journalists and various...

Numerous people from China immigrated to the US during the era of industrialization and expansion. Provide your class with a glimpse into the life of a Chinese immigrant through the poetry they left behind. They then compose a poem of...

What's the best way to start a story? Learners write a memoir using effective openings. They research the process and work through a list of hooks to use in their writing. They use at least two hooks to begin their personal memoir. A...

Help create confident and competent Internet users for research purposes. Middle schoolers conduct Internet research and compose a paper on the computer. They learn how to properly cite Internet references and explore net etiquette.

Sixth graders are able to explain that there are pollutants in the Anacostia River, what these pollutants can cause, and how to prevent further pollution. They examine the impacts that the pollutants of the Anacostia River could have on...

Follow in Jules Verne's footsteps and take a journey to the center of the earth! Middle schoolers work together to design a trip inside the earth using their knowledge from the previous lessons in the unit.

Students examine the battle of Gettysburg as they write news articles. In this Battle of Gettysburg instructional activity, students become familiar with the job of the news reporter as they report on the events of the Battle of...

Looking for a great lesson on how to write a biography? Here, middle schoolers draw from magazine articles, novels, historical figures, and current events to choose a person, or character to write about in a biography. They follow a...

One photograph can represent so much more than the images on the film. Eighth graders select a photograph from the Civil War era and conduct additional research based on the subject matter from the picture. Once they complete the...

Drafting, revising, and editing is all apart of the publishing process. Using a series of documents as inspiration, young journalists compose a class Newspaper. They work independently and in groups to publish their own articles.

Can a negative perception of a president's foreign policy harm his or her historical legacy? A project that winds the clock back to the date of Theodore Roosevelt's death puts students at the editorial desk of a fictional newspaper....

High school scholars learn valuable information about how to run a newspaper in the third and final installment of a media literacy series. The unit scaffolds learners to success with background information before they plan for...