What do you call a tiny collection of galaxies? A puny-verse! Young scholars graph data gathered by scientists studying Cepheids. They attempt to identify a relationship between the variables through standard and logarithmical...

A story about feral girls raised by werewolves will have some interesting character development! Track how the girls and their teachers act, speak, and change with a lesson focused on Karen Russell's "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by...

Football fans and ready readers will enjoy a lesson based on H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights. Focusing on chapter 4, the lesson encourages tenth graders to examine Mike's character development as it relates to the season opener and...

The class gets creative after listening to a short story containing a definitive structure. They are required to think about character, relationship, and setting, while attempting to show rather than tell, in their writing. Dialogue,...

Young writers identify the characteristics of a bat and write an essay about bats. They construct a book about bats that includes information that they have learned through print materials and online resources.

Students unscramble 8 groups of words to form 8 complete questions beginning with the word "how." This inventive activity should be perfect for young writers.

Students unscramble 8 groups of words to form complete questions using the word "what" on the lines provided. This inventive worksheet should be perfect for young writers.

Help middle schoolers learnd about literary special effects using alliteration. They will review the definition for alliteration and complete several pages of activities that help them learn to identify and use alliteration. The word...

Students identify various techniques used in memoirs. They reflect on similarities and differences betwee two authors. Students define the term memior. They write about various techiques they noticed the authors used. Students write...

Help your writers get started with these hooks! Twenty-five opening lines from the "Lives" column in the New York Times Magazine act as prompts for creative writing. Have your learners choose one prompt and write an original essay....

The engagement is in the details. Young scholars learn the benefit of weaving descriptive and sensory details into the fabric of their writing through the activities in this lesson. As their hands explore items concealed in bags, a...

Young scholars learn how to distinguish between the mood of a piece of writing (how the work makes the reader feel) and the tone (the writer's attitude toward the material) in the sixth lesson in a poetry unit. After watching two very...

How can you tell the difference between fact and opinion? Using newspapers, learners determine which articles contain statements of fact, and which articles reflect the writer's opinion. The lesson plan includes a discussion format and a...

Just what did Ben Franklin read? By juxtaposing Ben Franklin’s reading material as a young man with an analysis of his developed ideas, learners gain the opportunity to see how the influences of his youthful reading played out. Roman,...

Encourage the poetic genius in your young creative writers with a poetry workshop. Fix form poems (cinquains acrostic poems, octopoems, hello/goodbye poems) provide a framework and encourage vocabulary development as well as an awareness...

Hip Hop? Country? Punk? R and B? So many styles. Young song writers consider the emotional effects of various style options before selecting the style best suited to the emotions they want to express in their song. The sixth in a...

After reading Elvira Woodruff's George Washington's Socks, young readers and writers embark upon writing their own historically based story, with a focus on developing ideas and details throughout the piece. In small groups, class...

Here is a great graphic organizer for ensuring that young researchers and writers cover all their bases when brainstorming a topic by considering the five W's (who, what, where, when, and why) and how.

Vivid writers all start out the same way: learning in elementary school how to use a variety of adjectives! Young grammarians add adjectives to eight fill-in-the-blank sentences.

Would you rather have a big shiny diamond ring or a diamond shiny big ring? Word choice and the order of adjectives can affect what a writer is trying to say. Teach young learners how to clarify their writing with a set of...

Knowing the parts of speech can make you a better writer! Young grammarians use sets of two and three adjectives to write engaging sentences, taking care to use the adjectives in the correct order.

Here comes a writing assignment, here comes a writing assignment, right in time for Christmas. Young letter writers respond to a series of questions posed by the interactive that then formats their responses into a letter to Santa.

To conclude a study of the French Revolution, young historians adopt the voice of critics of Napoleon Bonaparte and lay charges against him. They then craft a memoir in Napoleon's voice that details his motives and what he sees as his...

A lesson turns young historians into playwrights to understand and speak out against social injustice. Pupils work individually or in groups to write and perform monologues that deliver personal messages on social justice. Writers then...