The New York Times' Learning Network provides great lessons! This one uses articles from the paper to help readers understand homonyms like mail (verb and noun). It also includes an exercise in reading informational text. Links to the...

Encourage your writers to use sob instead of cry loudly to trade in adverbs for strong verbs. Improve your middle and high schoolers' writing with this humorously written lesson which demonstrates how to remove excessive adverbs. 

Students remove to beverbs from their writing. In this verb usage lesson, students write strategies from eliminating to be verbs, then locate the verbs in their writing and eliminate as many as possible.

Students find vivid verbs in literature and use them in their own writing. For this vivid verbs lesson, students use a 'Thinking Thesaurus' of major verbs to study common verbs. Students then practice rewriting sentences using vivid...

Students improve their personal and academic writing by use of one consistent verb tense.

Students find vivid verbs in the story Thank You for the Thistle, by Doree Durston. They add vivid verbs to an existing story to make it more interesting.

Reinforce the importance of the writing process with this publication lesson. Elementary and middle schoolers compose a parts of speech book which includes one page each for nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions,...

Examine the key strategies to proofreading a piece of writing for errors in sentence structure, usage, mechanics and spelling. Eighth graders practice putting into correct passage commonly confused words (too, two, to) when writing to a...

Students practice writing and speaking using conventional grammar, usage, and sentence structure. Students practice as a whole class and then demonstrate their knowledge in written activities. Handouts and worksheets are imbedded within...

Bring this lesson into your unit about creative writing and precise language. First, middle schoolers create a piece of writing with the help of their classmates. In the second part of this workshop, they edit their own piece of writing....

Young scholars construct sentences using nouns and verbs from a "renewable energy" word bank. For this cross curriculum ecology and sentence structure grammar and mechanics lesson, students listen to the book Our Earth: Clean Energy by...

Students analyze parts of speech, sentence structure, and ver usage in this ten lesson unit on grammar. Through games, activities, assignments, and printed material, the concepts are supported and reinforced in a creative way.

Fourth graders examine instructions for proofreading activities and develop strategies to use in proofreading. They find and correct errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics in different writing samples.

Students list non-standard English words they use in their community dialect. They create dictionary definitions for 15 of the words they come up with including: pronunciation, part of speech, definition and example of usage. They create...

Middle schoolers review the production or reception of word usage. They practice using vocabulary tips in both written and spoken usage. Students incorporate a variety of ways to comprehend unknown words.

Students explore the definition and derivation of the popular saying "dumb down." Using worksheets and lecture materials, students provide meanings for the phrase when used in varying contexts. They also consider the derivation of each...

Students write a comic. In this writing lesson plan, students discuss comic books and why they continue to be so popular. Students create a comic book using an imaginary character. Students must present a problem and solution in their...

Alliterative adjective nicknames generate stories inspired by Rosemary Wells' book Noisy Nora (also a thematic complement to any class with children who make a ruckus to get attention). Class members explore basic story elements --...

Students, after reading Fahrenheit 451, brainstorm inventions that could have been in the novel. They present their invention to the class and writing an expository essay about their creation.

Imagine a project that informs and entertains. Replace book reports with a bulletin board that highlights all the important elements of a novel. Readers research the author, create a timeline of events in the story, write a...

Students improve speaking confidence when using difficult question forms. This lesson focuses on helping students explain how to engage in this kind of social conversation. A worksheet imbedded in this plan provides practice.

Students chose Latin authors, their birthplace, life and works. They examine pictures of an Italian city and decide which Latin author it could be related to. They answer questions in Latin.

Now is the time to identify the great teachers in your school! Discuss the characteristics of persuasive writing and analyze an example. Then, each pupil chooses a teacher who they feel should be named teacher of the year. They plan and...

Young readers select a book from a provided list to use as the basis for an intensive class study of Holocaust novels. After completing their novels, groups create a multimedia presentation highlighting the elements of literature...