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...

A picture's worth a thousand words—and even more inspiration! A visual activity uses photographs to inspire writers. The process teaches aspects of narrative writing, such as point of view and characterization.

Ideas like this are highly effective for helping build better reading comprehension. The class listens to an excerpt from a grade-appropriate text, and they discuss what clues or words helped them visualize the scene. They then read a...

Mark Twain, the famous American author, is often studied in the school system. Use "The Prince and the Pauper" to analyze the differences between the text and its video version.  This instructional activity includes several...

Want to explore the process of writing a persuasive essay and tie it in with the upcoming elections? Class members use Venn diagrams and the hamburger model of persuasive writing to write a five-paragraph essay on elections and...

Introduce your classes to the Art of Rhetoric with a lesson that focuses on Aristotle's persuasive appeals and how they have been used, both ethically and unethically, to influence opinion.

Let me draw you a picture. Scholars read a quote from Roger Tory Peterson and discuss his views on drawings. They then create their own drawings of an ant or butterfly to add to their science journals. 

Help the class put a plan in place. With the detailed resource, pupils plan the first section of their graphic novelettes about an invention, creating and labeling their pages. Next, they work with partners to give and receive feedback...

Let's get opinionated. Scholars participate in a peer critique and revision process using a fun activity called a Four Corners strategy. After incorporating classmates' feedback, individuals share their final drafts of their opinion...

Pick a corner, any corner! Pupils use the Four Corners strategy and Peer Critique protocol to assess one another's draft letters to a publisher about an athlete's legacy. Scholars then use peer feedback to revise their letters.

Seventh graders review the steps in writing a math problem. They write story problems stating the situation, the problem to be solved, explaining the process used to solve the problem, and state the answer. Students view a PowerPoint...

Discover the exciting world of readers theater! Scholars learn all about the reading strategy, reading a script about American heroes and completing an I Notice/I Wonder chart. Next, pupils participate in readers theater using the...

Let's get graphic. Serving as the final performance task of the unit, scholars complete their graphic novelettes and design covers based on their sketches. Finally, they present their hard work to classmates. 

Pupils prepare for an participate in a debate. They watch instructional videos on how debates proceed. Pupils work in teams to research various topics, present their opinions on the issue, and respond to opposing viewpoints during a...

Students create a movie of a scene from The Crucible upon completion of reading the book. They assume a variety of roles in the film production.

Patterns happen everywhere, in music, math, and language! Fourth graders listen to the "William Tell Overture" visualizing the patterns that they hear. They then discuss and write an ABA poem that matches the ABA form found in the music...

Write an unsent letter about a consumer scam, paying attention to the writing conventions of punctuation and spelling. This lesson could be adapted to fit a variety of social issues in which letter writing is appropriate. 4

Learners create greeting cards from recycled products. They research how paper is recyled and the history of paper. They write free verse and create their own recycled paper. They use Microsoft Word to write their final drafts of verse...

Students research the Internet using hotlists to find two different versions of a fairy tale after watching a teacher presentation of two versions of The Three Little Pigs. They design a PowerPoint presentation that shows the comparisons...

After identifying the parts of a persuasive piece of writing, young writers explore different prewriting activities for the persuasive essay. They have the option to write a news article, personal narrative, or persuasive essay to...

Music can help us to access memories and events in a meaningful way, and Francis Scott Key used specific words to convey what he had seen and felt when writing what would become America's national anthem. Help your class connect to...

Students in a teacher education program write their own children's book. Using books already written, they review age appropriate for their grade level placement. They write their own story and illustrate it using various software...

Third graders review how they can save their work on a computer once they are finished. As a class, they complete various assignments based on a rubric they are given and save them to a disk. Using the assignments, they combine all of...

In this grade 2 writing prompt worksheet, learners are give a writing prompt from the book The Polar Express about using their senses to write about going on a trip around the world with Santa Claus. Pages include a rubric and teacher...