Use essential elements cards to help lesson plan! Each card contains an informational text common core standard for grade levels six through eight and suggestions for activities and supports. Cards address skills such as citing textual...

Young scholars identify both views on U.S. immigration policy. They write a persuasive essay defending either a liberal or restrictive immigration policy. Students identify the major laws regulating immigration since 1875. They create a...

Investigate and report on three issues related to a current election. Elementary aged learners research information about specific issues, develop an opinion, and write a persuasive essay using supporting details and evidence to support...

Reading and understanding informational text is a key element to understanding every discipline. Elementary learners read three different articles focused on various animals and habitats in the Hudson River. They answer comprehension...

What a scam! Middle and high schoolers pose as journalists exposing consumer fraud. In this activity, they write an article for a magazine using data collected during previous investigations (prior lessons) to defend their findings that...

The Learning Network is featuring an article about First Lady Michelle Obama and her quest to help reduce childhood obesity in America. The article talks about how she has talked with the top three suppliers of school lunches and has...

Imagine children working long hours in factories, coal mines, and in the fields. Class members examine a series of pictures and read about early attempts to regulate child labor and current child labor laws.

Get your young journalists above the fold with a set of lessons about newspapers. Kids focus on writing articles using the 5 Ws before creating a slide show presentation and blog entry to publish their writing.

Culminate a bioethics unit with the implementation of a instructional activity that incorporates the Socratic method to encourage class feedback and participation. Pupils participate in a discussion on bioethics and morality,...

A handout on speeches, part of a series on specific writing assignments, helps individuals develop their speech-writing skills. The resource starts with a discussion on audience and purpose and ends with tips to engage the audience.

Trading in Colonial America is the focus of a lesson plan that boosts reading skills. As a class, scholars examine the informational text for crucial details, use their newfound knowledge to share information with their peers, and write...

Finish or launch your unit on the solar system with a jigsaw project covering major celestial concepts such as the Milky Way Galaxy, asteroids, meteors, comets, Earth's moon, and, of course, all the planets. Learners start by...

Explore ways to make research and writing more interesting. The first in a series of three challenge activities designed to accompany Theme 2: Give It All You've Got involve creating sports cards, designing cereal boxes, and using other...

Explication may sound like a fancy word, but it's just a fancy way to say analysis. Using a handout on poetry explications, part of a larger series on specific writing assignments, writers learn how to break down and analyze a poem. The...

Explore the joy of math with you little learners! They practice creating math problems with numbers from a fact family using numbers 1-10. They work independently with a set of connecting cubes to aid them in creating number sentences...

If your class loves movies, this lesson is sure to interest them. After discussing the purpose and structure of movie reviews, young writers compose a movie review and discuss why people may read a review before they go see a film. The...

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a writing project for which participants write an entire novel in a single month. If you have decided to this in your class, this resource will be useful for you. This is an editing...

Looking for a great lesson plan on how to write a biography? Here, middle schoolers draw from magazine articles, novels, historical figures, and current events to choose a person, or character to write about in a biography. They follow a...

Expository writing is the focus of the language arts lesson presented here. In it, young writers review what expository writing is through a class discussion and teacher demonstration. Then, learners write expository text that describes...

Working on revision? Check out this resource on Common Core standard W.9-10.5, which focuses in particular on the writing process. After reading some information about the specifics of the standard and how to implement it in the...

Animals are the theme of this series of challenge activities. Extend scholars' learning opportunities by writing personal narratives and book reports, creating picture and alphabet books, and drawing scenes from stories read aloud.

You can claim that soda rots people's teeth or that dinosaurs were actually birds, but your claim will not stand up if it is not backed by evidence. A handout from UNC Writing Center, the seventh in the Writing the Paper series of 24,...

Reading and comprehending a poem is a lot different than doing the same for a piece of fiction or an informational text. As part of a sample English language arts examination, readers put their skills to the test by reading passages in...