Celebrate Eric Carle’s beloved children’s books, especially those about animals. Teachers and readers alike engage in Carle’s books as they explore the art and color in each of his stories, and how these elements support comprehension.

Celebrate the whimsical world of Dr. Seuss on Read Across America Day with a collection of science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics activities, each linked to a popular Dr. Seuss story. 

What a skillful way to incorporate Shel Silverstein, a wonderful author, into the classroom. Composed of three tasks, children are led through a series of text-dependent questions that force them to unveil the meaning of Silverstein's...

"Eneke the bird says since men have learnt to shoot without missing, he has learnt to fly without perching." As part of their study of Things Fall Apart, class members read Paul Hernadi and Francis Steen's essay, "The Tropical Landscapes...

They're going to be there with their family. Class members practice using and identifying the correct use of they're, there, and their with a skills practice worksheet. The top half of the worksheet gives brief background information on...

Make a connection between empathy and bullying with a reading passage that has readers thinking about other people's feelings. After reading, learners respond to ten reading comprehension questions involving short answer and multiple...

Who purloined the poodle? Class groups read police reports and theorize whodunnit. The sixth of a ten-lesson series on mysteries.

Draw back the curtain, add a spot of joy to your class, and let learners be lesson planed by a close reading exercise that models how to develop an interpretation based on evidence drawn from a text. Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue...

A thorough lesson plan takes your first grade class through Jane Yolen's beautiful Owl Moon. It crafts the unit with clear objectives, high-level guiding questions, cloze activities and sentence frames, and extension...

Young scholars create a PowerPoint show illustrating two types of figurative language. They demonstrate understanding of personification by creating and interpreting simple examples. They also demonstrate understanding of alliteration.

Haven't seen enough commas lately? Make it clear to your learners that commas should be used between coordinate adjectives. They can practice their new knowledge with this worksheet, which is made up of eight sentences to examine and...

Learners read several magazine articles on the same topic written from different political perspectives, paying particular attention to the diction, syntax, and arguments presented in support the point of view expressed. They then select...

Sometimes a teacher reading to a child doesn't think to stop to ask questions about the text. For those of us who don't engage the learners during reading activities, here is a set of cards that contain the questions all teachers need to...

Find out how much your class understood of the listed chapters of Wilson Rawls' novel. Class members respond to eight plot and character questions before looking closely at an instance of personification from the text. The resource is...

Learners consider the connection between poverty and education. In this language arts and social studies lesson plan, students research primary and secondary sources in order to explore the relationship between education and poverty.

A civil rights movement lesson designed specifically with the Common Core State Standards in mind, young learners are introduced to the story of Ruby Bridges as the first African American child to attend an all-white elementary...

Discover the Virtual Thesaurus with your class. They use the Virtual Thesaurus to assist them in an inquiry-based approach to discovering the meanings of some common Latin and Greek roots. Each child then teaches a particular root and...

Introducing herself as "a discouraged professor of English education," Alleen Pace Nilsen elaborates on the prominence of incorrect spelling in education today. She laments the overuse of spellcheck (and substituting the wrong words),...

Thoroughly cover the nuances of apostrophes, quotation marks, dashes, hyphens, colons, and semi-colons. Intended for higher-level English classes, the examples given pertain to tricky rules and formal language. There are no animations or...

Identify common prefixes and suffixes used in the English language and categorize the different kinds of information provided in a dictionary entry. Learners will write at least five pieces of information that they learn about a word...

Explore how the informality of electronic correspondence has affected communications in the workplace. Writers develop pages for a basic writing guide that contains rules and examples to help correct common writing errors. A great way to...

Instructors who want to use A Streetcar Named Desire as a core text need not rely of the kindness of other teachers to find engaging activities to support a study of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning drama.

Amicably dispel “the prejudices of…young mind(s)” by exposing them to the language of Jane Austen. Readers of Sense and Sensibility use desk-top strategies to teach one another the vocabulary from this classic romance novel. The resource...