Demonstrate gift giving as an act of caring about someone versus gifts for show (or gifts from the purse). Elementary learners practice giving gifts from the heart by creating a poem for someone special to them.

After reading about the life of George Moses Horton, the first slave to publish anti-slavery poetry, learners will recall his major accomplishments, provide a summary of the obstacles he faced, and identify common aspects of the...

Young scholars research an author and gather information that seems to support that person as author of The Night Before Christmas. They work in groups to gather the most solid evidence and they write a persuasive essay presenting their...

Young historians examine a memorial sculpture of the first African American regiment in the Civil War, and then compare how the experiences of the regiment are portrayed in letters and poetry, as well as in the motion...

After reading Loree Leedy's There's a Frog in My Throat: 440 Animal Sayings a Little Bird Told Me, kids create and illustrate their own poems that convey the meaning of an idiom. The poems are then transferred into Shutterfly's Photo...

I am dancing to the music in my head. Scholars learn to listen for music in their heads as they read literature and poems. After they identify and analyze poetic devices that relate to music, they create their own musical poems.

William Blake's immortal poem "The Tiger!" launches a study of these magnificent creatures. After a close reading of the poem, class members compare his poem to Blake's artwork. Individuals then choose a favorite tiger species to...

Students write Haiku poetry as they learn to express themselves in writing. In this written expression lesson, students use the writing process to develop their ideas in poetic form. They write about a picture or object that they bring...

Make learning the parts of a book fun by having pupils construct their own glossary entries, table of contents, and title page. Beginning with a review of text features and a hunt for examples, kids use previously written fables to...

Discover the lovely story of Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho with your class. Over the course of the lesson, pupils practice descriptive writing, write short narratives, collaborate in small groups, watch a powerful short film about Raimundo,...

Young historians discover the life of an incredible African American woman who, as an anti-slavery lecturer prior to the Civil War, defied stereotypes of what women could accomplish. Pupils explore the concept of stereotyping, read...

Explore the characters in My Antonia by Willa Cather with a biopoem assignment. Pupils use the provided format to write their poems about any character from the book.

Readers take the main characters in Matilda and individually describe them through a mnemonic. To get there, group members create an acrostic poem describing the character they were given, and choose one of the words from the...

"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly." The second lesson in an 11-part unit that accompanies The Twits by Roald Dahl uses poetry to encourage positive character traits. Mrs. Twit has ugly thoughts, but those...

Young balladeers analyze examples of ballads and generate a list of common traits (story, quatrains, rhyme schemes, refrains, etc.), then identify these traits in Robert W. Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee" and a ballad written by...

Here is an instructional activity that asks pupils to analyze poetry and sparks discussion about two different types of texts: asking how is the poem, If by Rudyard Kipling alike and different from the story, Bud, Not Buddy by...

Pupils take part in a close reading of the poem, If by Rudyard Kipling, in which they delve deep into its meaning and identify its rules to live by. As the grand discussion progresses, learners then relate the poem's rules with those...

In Audre Lorde's poem "From the House of Yemanjá," the speaker describes her mother's two faces, adding a whole new meaning to the phrase "two-faced." Pupils first read the final stanza of the contemporary poem. With a Quick Write, they...

Are we really all that different from people in the past? First, learners of all ages write an autobiographical poem. Then, they research the lives of historical figures. They use the same format that they used to write their own poem to...

“Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything.” Readers of Brave New World will be pierced by an activity that asks them to use details from the text to craft a biopoem for one of the characters in Aldous...

Work on your map skills with a packet of activities about the river basins in the Democratic Republic on Congo. Learners study the maps provided before answering the geography questions and writing an acrostic poem about the region.

Water is an interesting substance that all living things need to survive. Learners focus on the characteristics of water as they create a list of words related to water and then incorporate them into descriptive paragraphs. They then use...

The life of a tree is the focus of a packet consisting of several activities all covering a different subject. Second graders measure shadows, make pinecone critters, write poems, count rings, complete a word search, play tree tag, and...

A lesson help scholars identify emotions through facial expressions. After a friendly puppet reads scholars a poem all about feelings, learners act out how they would feel when a specific action happens to them. Participants watch and...