With the Common Core State Standards' growing focus on informational text, it's the perfect time to showcase this PowerPoint to your team of teachers. It's 59 slides focus on seven best practice structures: reading-as-thinking,...

Explore how illustrations add to a story. Young learners will look at picture books to see how the pictures tell the story. They create illustrations to go with a chosen story, and then flip the activity so they have to write a story to...

Learners discuss their personal connections with stories they've read in the past and identify techniques to connect with more stories. They create illustrations, construct task cards, and complete sentence stems based on books they read...

Kids answer 11 who, what, when, where, and why questions after reading a New York Times article about the Grammy Awards. Boosting reading comprehension by reading about a topical event keeps pupils informed and interested. A related blog...

A large part of analyzing or understanding art is knowing how to read about it. The New York Times has put together these who, what, where, when, and how questions to aid learners in comprehending informational pieces related to art and...

Here’s a cross-curricular program music activity that uses Peer Gynt to engage class members. Groups take one section of “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” choreograph their section of the tune to represent the story as they imagine it,...

Make your learners aware of the advantages and disadvantages of using different media in presentations. This straightforward resource evaluates media formations such as print, digital text, and videos. Although the subject of ballet is...

Make cute ladybugs with egg cartons and pipe cleaners! After you read some facts about ladybugs, use different materials to make some ladybugs for your classroom.

Kindergarteners practice new words through listening to and reading the science book Butterfly by Jenny Feely. The teacher will first choose words that are essential for understanding the text. Then, using pictures in the text,...

Informational text and impressionistic art lead a lesson about Harriet Tubman. Working in teams, scholars examine a variety of resources. They analyze, compare, and contrast the work.  Using their research findings, pupils create an...

Hopefully the third time's a charm when it comes to rebuilding London's Globe Theatre! With an informational text, readers learn about the reconstruction of the theatre in the 1990s. They also discover how modern health and safety...

Reading, writing, and rings! A lesson from NASA combines space science with authentic reading and writing tasks. Included in this lesson are pre-reading activities, four mini informational booklets on Saturn, a structured...

Imagine being one of the painters in 1910 at the Lyme Art Colony in Connecticut. Using the Florence Griswold Museum's on-line resources to gather information about the daily life of artists at the boardinghouse, learners write a letter...

Where do directors and set designers get their ideas so that the set they build creates the mood and atmosphere the director wants for a production? From the script! Introduce theater high schoolers to the script analysis techniques used...

Students explore the patterns of text structure to anticipate the kind of information that a reading might present. The lesson plan examines some of the components of reading writing and using nonfiction.

This scripted lesson suggests using the journalist’s five W’s (who, what, when, where, why) to teach readers how to summarize a story and to how to distinguish between significant and supporting details. A template and rubric are...

Students, through observation and discussion about the Coffin of Djed Mut, make connections between hieroglyphs and the English writing system. They create their own visual story using symbols that represent words.

What is technical knowledge? The class explores what technical knowledge might mean to an Olympic athlete. They catalog the different types of information that athletes would need to compete in various Winter Olympic sports and develop...

Why is Apple suing Samsung? Give your English language learners a bit of reading comprehension practice. First, they read the short passage provided, and then they complete 10 activities. There are true or false questions, matching...

After reading the New York Times article "Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen," learners answer eight who, what, when, where, and why questions. They post their answers on the New York Times Education Blog. A fun way to get learners...

Although not a complete lesson plan, this set of emotionally powerful texts could be used in a variety of lessons. From The New York Times' Learning Network site, the resource includes a poem, an excerpt from a New York Times article and...

There are many ways to tell a story; Richard Patterson's three-dimensional painting If serves as the inspiration for some creative storytelling for elementary school writers. They watch a clip from Toy Story (you'll need to...

Get your class going on one of the final assessments for a unit on short stories by introducing iMovie and its main features. For this tenth lesson in a series of fourteen, pupils take some time to explore iMovie before conducting an...

Turn the pictures on your phone into a great looking movies that will blow the hair back of whoever watches it. It is easy to make people laugh, cry, or just inform them about something interesting by using the creative tools available....