Students examine the use of tone in poetry. In this literature lesson, students read "We Real Cool," by Gwendolyn Brooks and use the provided graphic organizer to chart the poem's tone and mood.

Students practice their reading skills. In this reading fluency and comprehension lesson, students read instructor-selected passages from The Odyssey following the provided steps for the reading class activity that requires them to...

Students observe and demonstrate how to read silently. They discuss the "Cross-Checking" strategy, select a book for independent reading, and demonstrate silent reading. Students write a summary of what they have read in their reading...

Third graders gain an appreciation for writing, analyzing, reading and listening to poetry, viewing poems as a motivation for studying Japanese culture and tradition. They study and create their own haiku and tanka poems with illustrations.

Students experience and enjoy the sounds of poetry. They erform sound experiments with sonnets and closely read and analyze a sonnet by Shakespeare. Students write an analysis of how sound affects meaning in a sonnet chosen from the...

Students examine different poems from Emily Dickinson. They practice listening for meter in the poems and make connections between the texts. They also practice their own creative writing skills.

Young elementary learners develop expression while reading. They listen as the teacher demonstrates expression when reading aloud. Individual learners read with a partner and practice using expression in their reading. When their partner...

Turn your classroom into a music studio as groups work together to determine why music sounds different when performed live versus a recording. After listening to some different music, each group picks a poem, creates a recording, and...

Examine character in depth. Over the course of these six lessons, learners explore their own character traits, determine the traits of characters in the books they read, practice comparing and contrasting, and collaborate in small...

To gain insight into the many different types of habitats, individuals must first get to know their own. Here, scholars explore their school environment, draw a map, compare and contrast their surroundings to larger ones. They then...

Let's compare and contrast! Scholars use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the experience of reading a poem and listening to its audio version. Next, they complete graphic organizers, comparing two different genres: a poem and a...

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...

Here is a instructional activity that provides scholars with two opportunities to stretch their compare-and-contrast muscles. First, learners compare and contrast their experience reading the fourth stanza of If by Rudyard Kipling to...

Disagreements happen in a diverse democracy. It's what people do about these differences in a diverse society that the resource models. After listening to an eight-minute podcast about a woman who collaborated with people who have very...

By sharing a summary about their favorite book or movie, your young readers can then discuss the main ideas of their beloved stories. The concept transitions to finding the main idea in poetry. Class members use textual clues in various...

Students demonstrate reading comprehension by drawing a picture and writing a sentence about giraffes. In this early reading comprehension lesson plan, students listen to a read aloud and watch a video about giraffes before drawing a...

Students participate in visualization exercises as a reading comprehension strategy. As the teacher reads a poem, the students visualize the setting, then read the poem "Daddy's Making Dinner" and create a drawing of what they visualize...

Students observe and demonstrate visualization exercises to improve their reading comprehension. They discuss how to visualize images, then draw pictures for sentences written on the board. Students read the poem Gumeye Ball by Shel...

Middle schoolers read a poem and complete a TPCASTT chart. They make a prediction about the title (T) , paraphrase each line (P), identify poetic devices and nuances (C-connotation), explore mood and tone (A-attitude), point out shifts...

Seventh graders break down the barriers in reading, speaking, listening, writing and understanding poetry. As a whole group, they establish their own criteria for line breaks by discussing questions and taking notes on a PowerPoint...

To set the stage for reading Paradise Lost, class members compete an anticipation guide containing statements that connect to themes in Milton's epic poem.

To gain a better understanding of characters in Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, kids create a biopoem for one of her characters.

Help readers learn to create their own open-ended questions for any text you are working with. Using Bloom's Taxonomy, learners begin on the lower levels and work their way up to form questions that focus on synthesis instead of simple...

Learners apply reading comprehension skills to poetry and synthesize the information to create a new piece of work.