Ask your pupils to become amateur detectives and use clues to determine the meaning of words. Once they have analyzed the clues, they write the meaning on a provided blank line. If they internalize this process, they can use context...

Scholars need to learn as early as possible the different types of point of view, because one cannot speak in the second person for his entire life—it would be very rude. This covers first, second, and third person. The examples are...

Put your learners' skills in identifying point of view to the test (or just practice) with an activity that has them identify the point of view in a story by giving three textual examples. The directions are clear and examples of first...

Help your class tackle chunks of text with a simple graphic organizer. Pupils read three paragraphs and, as they read, draw pictures in the provided boxes that demonstrate what each paragraph says. There are three boxes on the page and...

Choose any passage that uses punctuation effectively and analyze it with your class. Learners read the passage out loud once, ignoring the punctuation. Then they read it again, but this time paying attention to all of the punctuation....

Chaotic, perjury, tenacious, vague, predatory, idiosyncrasy. Using Marzano and Brown’s six steps of direct instruction for vocabulary (choose, restate, illustrate, use, discuss, play) readers of And Then There Were None engage in a...

Students analyze common logos they see daily and describe what the logos bring to mind. They redesign a company logo incorporating the company's philosophy into their sketches. Students present their findings and redesign to the class.

Art and architecture go hand-in-hand. Kids watch clips from the Hayo Miyazaki film Spirited Away to better understand Japanese customs and architecture. The discussion questions included are very good, and will help you lead the class in...

Students analyze passages from The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, or the Arts of Wooing and Complementing, written in the seventeenth century. Students analyze the images, words and figures of speech the author used and compare the...

After viewing a Prezi presentation on Toulmin’s argument, (claim, reason, warrant, backing, grounds, qualifiers, rebuttals), groups re-examine the format, and then individuals craft an argument essay in response to Lord Chesterfields...

Binoculars are used as a metaphor for good descriptive writing. Class members first view a small picture and then an enlarged view of the same image in which the details come into focus. Next, learners examine a paragraph lacking sensory...

Pupils listen to a teacher reading of The Little Red Hen, identify the story elements and sequence them. They talk about different jobs associated with providing food and act out a play based on the story. Be aware that although several...

Fourth graders practice spelling words that have prefixes un-, re-, and pre-. Assign this as homework. To help meet Common Core standards, you could also have learners look up each word in the dictionary and write down definitions.

What makes someone cry? Little learners read the story,  Why Do You Cry?: Not a Sob Story by Kate Klise to discover a bit about crying and a bit about cause and effect. They'll fill out a cause and effect chart while they...

Providing several examples of figures of speech, such as irony, paradox, and personification, this presentation could complement your lecture on pragmatic humor or humor in writing. Examples from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in...

In 1856 Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts over the head with a cane. This event, which highlighted the acrimonious debate over the expansion of slavery, is the focus of a paper...

Following an exhaustive list of animal idioms, metaphors, and similes (categorized by animal), an online interactive quiz checks reader facility with their use. In each of 20 questions, a sentence has a definition for one expression in...

Give your learners quick definitions of simile, metaphor, and analogy. As the first slide in this PowerPoint suggests, you can use the presentation as a warm-up and have scholars record the words and their meanings in a Literary Terms...

Practice the five W's and question marks with a fun grammar worksheet. After copying the words who, what, where, when, why, and how, kindergartners fill the words into various questions. For extra practice, have kids come up with their...

Young scholars explore different types of doors from an artistic point of view. In this creative thinking lesson, students look at different types of architectural doors and doorways and analyze them. They create a project of a door as a...

Dive into Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and determine what it means to conform in society, and discuss as a group with the thoughts and plans available in these documents. Included are multiple activities and brain targets that form the...

How did the women in France feel about their country’s involvement in World War II? Class groups are assigned a country involved in WWII, and individuals within the group adopt the point of view of leaders, laborers, businessmen, women,...

If you are teaching Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, you can't afford to miss this source. An extensive list of ideas outlines numerous discussion topics, writing prompts, comprehension questions, oral presentations, and projects. Have class...

Explore the idea of democratic poetry. Upper graders read Walt Whitman, examining daguerreotypes, and compare Whitman to Langston Hughes. They describe aspects of Whitman's I Hear America Singing to Langston Hughes' Let America Be...