What does a philanthropist do? Help your class explore philanthropy using character development and literacy ideas. Learners will define and give examples of philanthropy, listen to The Lion and the Mouse, discuss how the characters help...

A thorough unit on literary analysis and character development culminates in a final writing assessment. Prompted to compare the parent-child relationships in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, high...

What happens when a tenuous grasp on sanity begins to slip? Compare Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Emily Dickinson's "I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain" with a lesson plan focused on developing a common central idea. High...

Help young writers with the daunting prospect of a five-paragraph essay. Using William Golding's Lord of the Flies, learners work through a short process to shore up their brainstorming and prepare to write a longer essay.

Wrapping presents, singing Christmas carols, writing Christmas cards and learning holiday vocabulary are all wrapped into this one exciting ESL lesson.

Practice comprehension skills using the story, The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon by Bea Uusma Schyffert. Learners answer questions, fill out graphic organizers, and engage in extension activities involving writing and...

Students discriminate initial sounds of words and categorize words based on the initial sound. They generate ideas and topics for writing and use prewriting and drafting strategies to formulate text.

Students read and explore autumn poetry. In this poetry lesson, students read Autumnblings and are introduced to different poetic forms. Lesson includes ideas for exploring the poetic forms presented in the book and cross-curricular...

Follow up a reading of The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me by Roald Dahl with this collaborative lesson on teamwork. Starting with a fun team game, learners go on to investigate examples of teamwork in the story before...

Carve out some time for your youngsters to write in their journal. Today, they write a story about pets. They learn the value of a journal and how to keep up with it, and they enhance story development by planning their story before...

Students discuss various ways families and communities pass down oral and visual art forms to younger generations. This multi-subject introductory lesson prepares students to create a project about their own families.

After examining winning entries to the Nicholas A. Virgilio Memorial Haiku Competition, young poets try their hand at this fixed form.

Work with your department or on your own to create organized unit plans that connect to all parts of the Common Core standards. The three-page template includes space to summarize the unit, list standards for each category of the ELA...

Tackle some big questions about A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle with a board game project. As learners brainstorm for and complete their board games, they consider what helps and hinders Meg on her journey and why she succeeds in...

Class members continue their analysis of Letters to a Young Poet, paying particular attention to how Rilke uses metaphor to develop his ideas about the source of inspiration.

Experience anthropomorphism and metamorphosis in action with flipbooks! Instead of giving human characteristics to animals, though, pupils will show a transformation from human to animal or vise versa through their drawings. The...

No matter how difficult high school writing may seem, college writing presents challenges of its own. The fourth in a series of 24 handouts from The Writing Center at UNC breaks down the expectations for college writing. Scholars learn...

The intricate craft of narrative writing can make a happy story feel exuberant or a sad story feel devastating. With 42 extensive lessons that include poignant discussion questions, standards-aligned self-reflections, engaging writing...

If your rockin' writers use Six-Trait Writing, you'll definitely want to include these displays around your classroom throughout the year. Each trait (e.g. voice, word choice, organization, ideas, sentence fluency, conventions) is...

Bring the drama of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to class with a fun role-playing activity. Given a list of survival items, readers decide which items would be the most necessary for an adventure like...

Fourth graders work in groups of four, they are the managers of a new company, needing to hire employees. They brainstorm what they believe is important information to know about a future employee and share their list with the class....

Fifth graders brainstorm some ideas for each of the columns. As they call them out, write some on the sticky notes until each sticky note is used for each column They stay in the same groups; have each group draw one sticky note from...

Exercise paragraph writing by focusing on the impact of each statement or idea. For this organizational pattern, writers compose their paragraphs by increasing the force of each idea so that the most important idea is the concluding...