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...

Explore a variety of fables to learn life's lessons through engaging stories. Add rigor to the learning process with activities that include matching a a fable to the story's moral, short answer exit slips, and a three-column graphic...

What's got 60 eyes, 150 fingers, and an endless number of ideas? Your language arts class! Challenge young writers to come up with clever riddles with an online poetry lesson.

Middle schoolers are likely very familiar with the concept of bullying and cliques. Discuss their experiences and brainstorm ways to handle peer conflict and feelings of exclusion with a poem that focuses on bullying, and a second lesson...

Three mini units make up one large unit designed to explore multiculturalism and encourage cultural identity. Each lesson sparks thoughtful discussion, critical thinking, and are equipped with activities and assignments geared to...

Learners follow five steps to compose an alliteration poem. They choose one consonant and brainstorm as many nouns, verbs, and adjectives they can think of to create rhyming sentences that come together in a poetic fashion. 

Budding poets choose a topic for a sensory-filled poem. Authors describe that topic using detailed language based on the five senses. Then, switch the senses to create a fanciful poem intended to add a touch of fun to the objective. 

Get the scoop with a fun, engaging newspaper project. After analyzing the parts of a newspaper, including the headline, subtitles, and pictures or images, young journalists get to work by writing their own stories in a newspaper article...

Meant to be used in connection with the article "In Teacher Ratings, Good Test Scores Are Sometimes Not Good Enough" also available on The New York Times website, this resource provides 12 short-answer writing prompts that ask both basic...

Introduce learners to allegorical art with four bronze sculptures by Francesco Bertos. After modeling how to recognize bias and allegory in Bertos' Africa, class groups examine the other three sculptures in the series before creating...

Four steps to Open Mic Night! The location, invitations, supplies, and party favors are all part of the process in planning and hosting a fun-filled gathering where scholars read aloud an original poem or one by their favorite author. 

A repetition poem is the focus of a lesson that challenges scholars to compose an original piece. To add meaning to their poem, authors choose words to repeat at the start of most lines.  

Nine lessons makeup a unit designed to reinforce grammar and vocabulary through practice pages based on readings of African folktales. Each lesson consists of a mini lesson, a vocabulary review, and a worksheet. Topics include...

Who was Vincent van Gogh? Most of the questions can be answered in two or three sentences; however, there is at least one essay prompt and one personal response question that require longer answers. Questions call for a good mix of...

Focus on a passage about the new year with your English language learners. You can start with reading the passage aloud to your class, and then launch into the related activities. Pupils match phrases, complete cloze-style activities,...

Engage your class in the elements of poetry with a series of lessons and activities. The plans cover simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and imagery. Learners come up their their own metaphors, identify poetic...

A great source of high-interest reading for the language arts classroom! Meant to be used with an article also available on the New York Times website, this worksheet provides 10 comprehension questions about the reading as well as one...

A haiku is the focus of an activity that challenges scholars to draft an original poem. Authors discover the origin and components of a haiku, read three example poems, then follow six steps to compose their own. 

Budding poets compose an original free verse poem. Encouraged to use personification and alliteration, scholars read over three tips and examples then try their hand at drafting a poem of their own style.  

Scholars take a popular song or nursery rhyme and make it their own as they write a fractured nursery rhyme. Writers seek out a nursery rhyme's rhyming words and change them to create an original poem.  

May the comprehension skills be with you! Focus on context clues, vocabulary words, and analysis questions with an article about Star Wars: The Force Awakens and its record-breaking ticket sales.  

Tap into the imaginative minds of young learners with a creative writing activity. After reading the myth Giants and Mosquitoes, this student guide supports young writers as they brainstorm and develop their very own creation myths....

"O pun" the door on this activity. Have your pupils compare the puns and word play in scenes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to those in Gary Blackwood’s The Shakespeare Stealer. Warm up and introductory activities, as well as...

Looking for some additional materials for Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"? Included in a 14-page packet are an anticipation guide, a vocabulary list, exercise, and quiz, a list of literary terms, and an essay assignment with pre-writing...