Figurative language is the focus in the book Teach Us, Amelia Bedelia. After reading Peggy Parish's book, class members dramatize idioms from the text, using dramatic strategies such as characterization, exaggeration, and...

Examine the technique of writing a script and complete a worksheet in which young writers summarize a favorite chapter in a Harry Potter book. They practice public speaking by acting out the summarization scenes for classmates. Handouts...

Bring your learners together to write a class narrative about the first day of school. Start off by teaching them about sequence with a quick oral activity. Then, work together to fill out a story map. Finally, compose the class...

Revision is the key to great writing. Individuals revise their readers theater scripts and write a group conclusion. Scholars then perform their scripts for another group and receive feedback.

What is dialogue? What must it contain? Use this plan to discuss dialogue with your emerging writers. They write a dialogue in script form to dramatize a conversation. Dialogue examples are included. 

Ready, set, write! Every great film begins with a script, and every presentation starts with a plan. Directors use their research and experience to compose an essay explaining the rationale behind their film's musical and visual choices...

Start a writing lesson by examining a news video that explains writing clearly, concisely, and correctly. Learners consider the importance of writing news properly to avoid breaking the law, then write their own weekend news stories.

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...

Students use the writing process to write a radio show.  For this writing process lesson, students need to effectively use the writing process to create a radio show and then present to the class.  Member of the group take...

Develop novice script-writers. Small groups sift through a sample script, noting any script-writing conventions to share with the whole class. Using these conventions and plot structures, these groups compose a script for a 10-minute...

Have your class conduct research to learn all they can about simple machines. They use the web, take notes from a video, write a script, then make a film describing various simple machines found in real life. These videos are then...

How are novels and scripts alike and different? As part of the mid-unit assessment, scholars complete a Venn diagram to compare two types of writing: a novel and a script. Next, they respond to short-answer questions, evaluating passages...

In this writing a podcast lesson plan, 7th graders create a podcast involving Ancient Greece. Middle schoolers follow a rubric and outline to create their podcast. Students present their podcast to their fellow middle schoolers.

Need a musical lesson for your drama or performing arts class? VH1 has put together a really neat lesson, in which learners use biographical information about Alicia Keys to write and perform a one-act musical related to her life. This...

Encourage scholars to retell their favorite short story or folktale, adding personal details to make it their own. After reading their book of choice several times, story tellers retell a tale verbally to their classmates. 

The Boston Massacre may be an iconic event in American history, but perhaps the British soldiers had another point of view. Using primary sources, including reports from Boston newspapers and secondary sources from the British...

That's all, folks! Scholars work with their group members to create conclusions for their To Kill A Mockingbird reader's theater scripts. They use a criteria list to help guide their conclusion writing and discuss how the conclusions...

Middle schoolers read a novel and discuss character personality. First, they analyze a character in a novel and keep a chart or web of the character's identity, which includes specific examples from the book. They then write a script...

Students research the effects of living in a hurricane zone. In this hurricane zone lesson, students research the impact of natural disasters on humans and the environment, and write a press release describing the devastation of...

Practice sounding out multi-syllable words with this scaffolded lesson. Learners decode words by segmenting them into phonemes and combining the sounds. Your lines are in bold here, but you can easily use this simply as an outline...

Take writing prompts to another level in this activity, which allows pupils to create scenes of dialogue based on the 1903 silent film, The Great Train Robbery. Useful for a language arts/history cross-curricular activity, the activity...

Speaking of the Internet. The culminating instructional activity for the unit on the Internet challenges pupils to prepare short, two-minute speeches on an issue facing society. The pupils chose from three topics that connect...

Students practice using their target language by writing a news article.  For this foreign language writing lesson, students create a fictional "hero" in their city which they write a fictional news article about in their new...

Young historians research the devastating attacks of 9/11 and use that information to script their own documentaries. The follow-up activity includes recording the documentary and conducting classmate interviews,