Practice makes perfect when it comes to learning grammar with this ESL resource. Offering a great way to teach about relative clauses, this lesson engages students with a series of partner, small group, and whole class speaking and...

Similes and metaphors are the focus of a poetry lesson complete with two exercises. Scholars read poetry excerpts, underline comparative phrases, then identify whether it contains a simile or metaphor. They then write five...

What's the difference between the present perfect and simple past? Have your class practice identifying and using both of these verb tenses through pair activities, whole-class discussion, and a worksheet.

Paul Simon's "Father and Daughter" offers language learners and native English speakers an opportunity to study adverb, adjective, and noun clauses.

Denali National Park and the rain forests of Brazil are the settings for a series of lessons on animal encounters with grizzly bears and golden lion tamarins. The 32-page packet includes scripted lesson plans, activity suggestions, and...

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy's swing rendition of Robert and Richard Sherman's "I Wanna Be Like You" offers young grammarians an opportunity to examine verb tenses, noun clauses, gerunds, and prepositions.

The capitalization rules are strict and inflexible—until you experience the fluid beauty of an Emily Dickinson poem. Ninth graders test their existing knowledge of language arts conventions with the many bent grammar rules in "I Felt a...

As the unit on research writing draws to a close, class members continue to revise and edit their papers, this time focusing on grammar, spelling, and punctuation (colon and semicolon).

Here is a lesson that sounds like a lot of fun. Kids discuss the artistic elements and motives for the painting, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. To get the scope and scale of this oversized masterpiece, they use butcher paper and the...

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" serves as an exemplar for a mini-lesson plan on semicolons. Working alone or in small groups, class members first circle all the semicolons in the letter, and then consider how...

Earthquakes, hurricanes, volcano eruptions, and more. To enrich their study of nature's big events, kids map tectonic plates and major earthquake locations, identify emergency response agencies, and storyboard a film about volcanos.

This activities in this packet, the second in the series of support materials for the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt thematic units on animal habitats, are designed specifically for English language learners.

Opinion, audience, purpose. Fourth graders are introduced to the three characteristics of persuasive writing in the third unit of a year-long writing program. The 98-page packet is complete with plans, model essays, graphic organizers,...

Over the course of five periods, scholars create a poetry portfolio. They begin with a reading of the poem, Firefly. With a focus on vocabulary, learners reread the poem then look for sight words and other skills. 

Built around a moving short film about second chances and tough choices, this lesson mixes grammar, prediction, and narrative writing. Pupils practice with adjectives and prefixes before moving on to the film. The resource directs...

Six lessons comprise a unit about Roald Dahl's George's Marvelous Medicine. Over time, scholars explore themes such as the power of words, exciting writing, and mixed feelings. They examine the writing's literary devices, persuasive...

Six tasks make up a lesson plan designed to reinforce comprehension and language skills using the poem "The Pied Piper" by Robert Browing. Scholars discuss and define unknown words, identify adjectives and onomatopoeia, review...

Learning to analyze language, symbols, and codes is part of becoming a deep and critical thinker. Young analysts consider their ability to see hidden messages as they analyze the work of Paul Chan. There are two fully developed...

ESL/ELD learners are provided extra support with the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt thematic units on silly stories by this packet of activities, exercises, and practice sets.

Plant or animal? As part of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt thematic unit Our Earth, learners engage in activities and exercises that provide them with extra support to master the concepts in the unit.

Students explore the sport of lacrosse to improve their reading and grammar skills. In this reading and grammar lesson, students read and discuss the sport of Lacrosse. Students complete a Cloze activity, a grammar activity, and a...

Take your guided reading lesson plans to the next level with a collection of printables, templates, and reference tools equipped to support the reading needs of your readers. Included is a detailed information page, grouping sheet,...

English language learners act out verbs, discuss their importance in constructing grammatically correct sentences, and then learn about helping verbs. They use helping verbs in a sentence then discuss how they are different from action...

"What did you do yesterday?" Language learners engage in carefully scaffolded activities that review past tense regular verbs, that introduce new vocabulary words, and that permit practice of using the past tense of...