"Stop! Think! and Cool Down!" Participants in the third activity in the Resolving Conflicts module learn how to pause and reflect in stressful situations rather than react. The class generates a list of strategies that could help control...

Introduce young poets to Blackout Poetry. Much like Found Poems, Blackout Poetry challenges scholars to rethink the process writers may use to craft their poems. After watching a short video in which poet Austin Kleon describes his...

Put a spotlight on internet safety with a lesson designed to boost positive online communication. Scholars listen to the story, Yettele's Feathers by Joan Rothenberg, and answer questions. An emoji-themed handout challenges pupils...

A lesson spotlights the story, The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi. After a read-aloud, the class retells the story using puppets or dress-up. They participate in a thoughtful discussion about the story, answer questions relating the...

Why do people engage in cyberbullying? What can be done about it? These are the questions middle schoolers consider in a very timely lesson. Participants view PSA announcements, read a case study, and participate in scenarios designed to...

Young orators demonstrate what they have learned about persuasion and persuasive devices throughout the unit by analyzing a persuasive speech and then crafting their persuasive essays. Class members engage in a role-play exercise, use...

Young journalists learn how to prepare for an interview, conduct an interview, and craft good interview questions with follow-up questions. After they watch and analyze several interviews, class members select a senior to interview,...

"Warning: Conducting this lesson may be harmful." Such statements, called "Trigger Warnings," are the focus of a two-part lesson that looks at censorship, especially the pros and cons of trigger warnings. Class members read two articles,...

Senior Spotlight! Read all about them! Young photojournalists put together their articles and photographs, craft a layout, and publish their interviews with a senior from their high school.

Learning how to craft a cogent argument based on a solid claim, supported with evidence and solid reasoning, is an important life skill. Teach middle schoolers about argumentative writing with a lesson asking them to analyze the claims,...

"The Dinner Party" is the anchor text in a lesson designed to encourage writers to use sensory details in their stories. After brainstorming descriptive words and phrases for the five senses, class members read Mona Gardner's...

S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders allows middle schoolers to reflect on mob mentality. After reading an article and watching a video about herd mentality, class members find examples in the novel of when characters go along with the...

A thoughtful discussion prompts middle schoolers to reflect on gossip and rumors, what they are, their experience with them, and how some groups experience it more than others. Scenarios challenge participants to consider the impact of...

Read it, hear it, see it, do it! Young poets experience Edward Hirsch's memory poem, "Cotton Candy," by first closely reading the poem silently, then aloud, watching a video of the poet reading it, and crafting their memory poem of an...

The first lesson of a five-lesson unit designed for eighth graders has class members reading and watching a video of Edgar Allen Poe's narrative poem, "The Raven." They then craft their narrative poem, illustrate it, and share their work...

Walt Whitman's "Captain, My Captain" and Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" provide seventh graders with examples of odes. After reading and discussing these and other examples, young poets craft an ode and respond to the ode of a...

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...

Fourth-grade writers applaud their historical narrative writing pieces through a Writer's Gallery. First, they read an assigned classmate's work and leave a positive comment on a sticky note. Once learners have read a couple of people's...

Class members discover what it means to publish their works. Working on a computer, young writers use an online dictionary to edit their spellings and conventions based on the information added to the rubric. From here, and most of the...

As the unit on research writing draws to a close, class members continue to revise and edit their papers, this time focusing on grammar, spelling, and punctuation (colon and semicolon).

Writers complete editing and polishing the final draft of their research paper and submit the document for assessment.

Scholars read their poems to their research teams as their final performance task. The teams listen and give feedback on the flow between the two poems. Writers then take the feedback from their teams and revise their poems before...

It's all in the technique. Scholars revisit the model narrative they covered in lesson four to analyze the author's writing techniques. Readers compare techniques they spot in the narrative to those in the essay rubric. They then work to...

It's time to demonstrate knowledge. With the instructive resource, pupils complete the second part of the end of unit assessment. They develop sections two and three of their storyboards about an invention, add visual elements, and then...