Traci Gardner

Traci is an educator and writer who composes lesson plans on reading, writing and literature, and who designs online curricular and professional development resources. From 2002-2008 she was the Online Content Developer for ReadWriteThink at NCTE. Previously, she served as Online Resources Manager, managing NCTE’s Web site. She is an editor of the Engaging Media-Savvy Students Topical Resource Kit and her book Designing Writing Assignments offers practical ways for teachers to develop assignments that allow students to express their creativity and grow as writers.

Lessons on ReadWriteThink

A Daily DEAR Program: Drop Everything, and Read! (3-5)
The teacher shouts, "Drop Everything and Read!" and students settle into their seats to read books they've selected. This independent reading program is much more than a just-sit-there-and-read experience—it's a program that helps students build the habit of lifelong reading for the love of it.

A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words: From Image to Detailed Narrative (6-8)
The old cliche "A picture is worth a thousand words" is put to the test in this lesson. Distribute or show a picture that tells a story and then encourage students to brainstorm words and ideas about the image before writing a story that tells background on the image or extends details on what has happened.

Action Is Character: Exploring Character Traits with Adjectives (6-8)
In this activity, students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using Internet reference tools to compile lists of accurate, powerful adjectives. In class discussion, students support their lists with details from the novel.

Analyzing the Stylistic Choices of Political Cartoonists (9-12)
Students explore and analyze the techniques that political (or editorial) cartoonists use and draw conclusions about why the cartoonists choose those techniques to communicate their messages.

And I Quote: A Punctuation Proofreading Mini-lesson (9-12)
This lesson plan reviews the basic conventions for using quotations from works of literature or references from a research project, focusing on accurate punctuation and page layout. After discussing the rules and analyzing their use in sample passages, students apply the conventions to their texts.

Assessing Cultural Relevance: Exploring Personal Connections to a Text (9-12)
As a class, students evaluate a nonfiction or realistic fiction text for its cultural relevance to themselves personally and as a group. After completing this full-class activity, students search for additional, relevant texts; each choose one; and write reviews of the texts that they choose. Students are highly encouraged to identify a text that is personally relevant to themselves and their peers. This lesson is an especially powerful choice for English language learners.

Audio Broadcasts and Podcasts: Oral Storytelling and Dramatization (9-12)
Audio broadcasts provide an individualized experience for listeners, who create mental images to accompany the words and sounds they hear. Orson Welles’ broadcast of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in October 1938 provides perhaps the most well-known example of listeners’ imaginations leading to a very vivid experience. After exploring Welles’ broadcast, students create criteria for effective audio dramatizations and then compose their own dramatization of a scene from a recent reading.

Audio Listening Practices: Exploring Personal Experiences with Audio Texts (9-12)
This lesson plan asks students to explore the ways that audio texts play a role in their lives. Students keep a daily diary that records how and when they listen to audio texts, such as radio, streaming media, songs on MP3 players, and podcasts. Students then analyze the details and compare their results to published reports on American radio listeners. They conclude by reflecting on their findings and writing a final statement on their audio literacy practices and interests.

Authentic Persuasive Writing to Promote Summer Reading (9-12)
Devote time during your last weeks of school to promote summer reading by inviting students to create brochures and flyers that suggest books and genres to explore during the summer months. This lesson can be customized to focus on another time of year or specific focus.

Avalanche, Aztek, or Bravada? A Connotation Mini-Lesson (6-8)
Would you rather drive an Avalanche, an Aztek, a Bravada, a Suburban or a Vue? In this mini-lesson, students examine familiar car names for underlying connotations then proceed through a series of steps, increasing their control over language, until they select words with powerful connotations in their own writing.

Avoiding Sexist Language by Using Gender-Fair Pronouns (9-12)
In this lesson plan, students write a response to a short prompt which includes no information about the participants' gender. Once the writing is complete, students and teacher analyze the narratives for the use of pronouns and what the pronoun choices reveal about language use.

Battling for Liberty: Tecumseh’s and Patrick Henry’s Language of Resistance (6-8)
This lesson extends the study of Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" speech to demonstrate the ways Native Americans also resisted oppression through rhetoric and action. Through reading and hearing the speeches of Tecumseh, students develop a new respect for the Native Americans' politically effective and poetic use of language.

Become a Character: Adjectives, Character Traits, and Perspective (9-12)
In this activity, students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using Internet reference tools to compile lists of accurate, powerful adjectives. In class discussion, students support their lists with details from the novel.

Book Clubs: Reading for Fun (3-5)
Students reading on their own and just for fun? Sure! This lesson explores how small groups of students decide to meet every other day to discuss what they've read in a "just for fun" book club they've organized—and that they control.

Book Report Alternative: A Character’s Letter to the Editor (6-8)
Students assume the persona of a character from a book that they have read and write a persuasive letter to the editor of a newspaper from that character’s perspective, focusing on a specific issue or situation explored in the novel.

Book Report Alternative: Character and Author Business Cards (6-8)
When students make business cards for characters in books they've read or for the authors of those books, they're forced to think symbolically in order to create a short, simple text that represents the target appropriately—providing a title, relevant images, and other pertinent information.

Book Report Alternative: Comic Strips and Cartoon Squares (6-8)
Students tire of responding to novels in the same ways. They want new ways to think about a work of literature and new ways to dig into it. By creating comic strips or cartoon squares featuring characters in books, they're encouraged to think analytically about the characters, events, and themes they've explored in ways that expand their critical thinking by focusing on crystallizing the significant points of the book in a few short scenes.

Book Report Alternative: Creating Careers for Characters (6-8)
What if one of the characters in the book you've been reading was looking for a job? This question is the focus of this activity which bridges technical writing and literary analysis by inviting students to become characters in a novel they have read, find a job for those characters, and write application letters and resumes for their assumed persona.

Book Report Alternative: Summary, Symbol, and Analysis in Bookmarks (6-8)
Students love to make bookmarks on the computer because they get to share their ideas with other readers at their school. Teachers love the project because it gives students practice in summarizing, recognizing symbols, and writing reviews—all while writing for an authentic audience.

Bright Morning: Exploring Character Development in Fiction (3-5)
"If you were going to introduce the character you're reading about to someone who had never read the text, what words would you use to describe him or her?" With this question, students embark on an exploration of character in their reading, identifying traits and pointing to textual support.

Campaigning for Fair Use: Public Service Announcements on Copyright Awareness (6-8)
Students explore a range of resources on fair use and copyright then design their own audio public service announcements (PSAs), to be broadcast over the school’s public address system. Work can also be published as podcasts on the Internet. Students tap research and persuasive writing strategies as they design announcements for an audience of their peers.

Character Clash: A Mini-Lesson on Paragraphing and Dialogue (6-8)
When writers include dialogue in their stories, one of the questions that frequently comes up is how to structure texts that have changing speakers or thinkers. This lesson helps students identify the structures that will clarify their text by using colored markers or online resources.

Charlotte is Wise, Patient, and Caring: Adjectives and Character Traits (3-5)
In this activity, students define the characteristics of adjectives and find examples of the part of speech in a shared reading. Then students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using Internet reference tools to compile lists of accurate, powerful adjectives. In class discussion, students support their lists with details from the reading.

Childhood Remembrances: Life and Art Intersect in Nikki Giovanni’s “Nikki-Rosa” (6-8)
Adapted from Carol Jago’s Nikki Giovanni in the Classroom, this lesson invites students to explore what Jago calls the place “where life and art intersect” by completing a close reading of Giovanni’s poem and then writing about childhood memories of their own.

Choosing Clear and Varied Dialogue Tags: A Mini-Lesson (3-5)
In this mini-lesson, students explore the use of dialogue tags such as “he said” or “she answered” in picture books and novels, discussing their purpose, form, and style. Students identify dialogue tags in stories, collaboratively revise a passage from a novel to add more variety to the tags, and then apply the text structure to stories that they have written.

Comic Makeovers: Examining Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Media (9-12)
Students explore representations of race, class, ethnicity, and gender by analyzing comics over a two-week period and then re-envisioning them with a "comic character makeover." This activity leads to greater awareness of the stereotypes in the media and urges students to form more realistic visions as they perform their makeovers.

Composing Cinquain Poems with Basic Parts of Speech (3-5)
Cinquain (pronounced "cin-kain") is a five-line form, using a wavelike syllable count of two-four-six-eight-two. In this lesson, students learn about cinquain and write simple cinquain of their own.

Composing Cinquain Poems: A Quick-Writing Activity (K-2)
Cinquain (pronounced "cin-kain") is a five-line poetic form, using a wavelike syllable count of two-four-six-eight-two. In this lesson, students write simple cinquain of their own as a follow-up to a subject they have been exploring in class (for instance, units on animals, community, rainforest, or on a particular picture book, such as Amazing Grace).

Cooking Up Descriptive Language: Designing Restaurant Menus (6-8)
Students explore the genre of menus by analyzing existing menus from local restaurants, including a review of adjectives and descriptive writing based on the language included in the menu examples. After establishing the characteristics of the genre, students work in groups to choose a restaurant and then create their own custom menus.

Daily Book Boosts (3-5)
Each day at the end of their independent reading time, students give Book Boosts, one-minute raves about books they’ve read. These Book Boosts are easy ways to suggest a multitude of titles to students, and they act as a way for students to have something to think about as they read.

Defining Literacy in a Digital World (9-12)
Through listing and observation, students identify the many texts that they read and compose —including books and magazines, television shows, movies, audio broadcasts, hypertexts, and animations. By creating an inventory of personal texts, students begin to consciously recognize the many literacy demands in contemporary society. With this start, they create a working definition of literacy that they refine and explore further as the term continues.

Designing Effective Poster Presentations (9-12)
Students explore the genre of posters, review informational writing and visual design, and then design poster presentations to share in class or at a school-wide fair.

Developing Reading Plans to Support Independent Reading  (6-8)
Students identify books they have read recently and look for patterns connecting those that they enjoyed the most. Once they've analyzed their past readings, students complete a reading plan, a simple wish list of books they hope to read in the future, based on their preferences in the past. The finished list becomes another supporting resource to guide independent readers.

Discovering Poetic Form and Structure Using Concrete Poems (9-12)
This lesson uses concrete poems, which relate the placement of the words on the page to the meaning of the poem, to explore the connection between a poem's layout and its meaning. While an enjoyable activity any time of year, the lesson is especially topical near Columbus Day.

Dr. Seuss’s Sound Words: Playing with Phonics and Spelling (K-2)
Boom! Br-r-ring! Cluck! Moo!—you are bound to find exciting sounds everywhere. Whether you visit online sites that play sounds or take a sound hike, ask your students to notice the sounds they hear then write their own poems, using sound words, based on Dr. Seuss's Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?

Draft Letters: Improving Student Writing through Critical Thinking  (9-12)
Draft letters asks students to think critically about their writing on a specific assignment before submitting their work to a reader. This lesson explains the strategy and provides models for the project, which can be adapted for any grade level and any writing project.

Every Punctuation Mark Matters: A Mini-Lesson on Semicolons (6-8)
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" demonstrates that even the smallest punctuation mark signals a stylistic decision, distinguishing one writer from another and enabling an author to move an audience. In this mini-lesson, students first explore Dr. King's use of semicolons and their rhetorical significance then apply the lesson to their own writing by searching for ways to follow Dr. King's model and use the punctuation mark in their own writing.

Exploring Audience and Purpose with a Single Issue (9-12)
Students explore the rhetorical concept of audience and purpose by focusing on an issue that divided Americans in 1925, the debate of evolution versus creationism raised by the Scopes Monkey Trial. Students analyze the audience and purpose of at least one resource on the debate and then consider how audience and purpose might shape other communication on the issue.

From Dr. Seuss to Jonathan Swift: Exploring the History behind the Satire (9-12)
After exploring the historical allusions behind Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book, the whole class discusses the history behind a passage from Gulliver’s Travels. After this group exploration, students research further historical allusions in Swift’s work and share their findings with the class.

Ghosts and Fear in Language Arts: Exploring the Ways Writers Scare Readers (9-12)
What is scary, and why does it fascinate us? How do writers and storytellers scare us? This lesson plan invites students to answer these questions by exploring their own scary stories and scary short stories and books. The lesson culminates in a Fright Fair, where students share scary projects that they have created, including posters, multimedia projects, and creative writing.

How Big Are Martin’s Big Words? Thinking Big about the Future (3-5)
Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tells of King's childhood determination to use "big words" through biographical information and quotations. In this lesson, students explore information on Dr. King to think about his "big" words, then they write about their own "big" words and dreams.

Inquiry on the Internet: Evaluating Web Pages for a Class Collection (6-8)
In this lesson plan, students explore a class inquiry project, collecting Web-based resources that can be used for further study during the course of the class or for more in-depth projects. Students use Internet search engines and Web analysis checklists and questions to find and evaluate online resources then write annotations that explain how and why the items they have found will be valuable to the class.

Inside or Outside? A Mini-Lesson on Quotation Marks and More (6-8)
Does that period go inside the quotation marks or outside them? When a writing activity includes dialogue, you're guaranteed to hear that question more than once. This lesson helps students identify the conventions and apply them to their text.

Investigating Names to Explore Personal History and Cultural Traditions (6-8)
In this lesson, students investigate the meanings and origins of their own names in order to establish their own personal histories and to explore cultural significance of naming traditions. After Internet research and interviews with family or community members, students write about their own names, using a passage from Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street as a model.

Involving Students and Families in Ongoing Reflection and Assessment (K-2)
In this lesson, students begin by writing a sentence or two each week and progress to daily reflections and records of their school activity. Families respond to these student reflections, which become the basis for discussion among family, teacher, and students. The reflections are also a key resource in regular student-family-teacher conferences that take place during the term.

Literary Parodies: Exploring a Writer’s Style through Imitation (9-12)
The popular saying “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” coined by Charles Caleb Colton, is the basis for this lesson, which asks students to analyze the features of a poet’s work then create their own poems based on the original model. By exploring sample poems and their parodies, students focus on the language and style of the original writer, all in the process of playing with poetry.

Many Years Later: Responding to Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”  (9-12)
Students analyze the literary features of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” and then imagine themselves as one of the characters in the poem many years in the future. Students write a fictional paper that demonstrates how the character’s days in the pool hall influenced who the character is today, nearly fifty years later.

Myth and Truth: Independence Day (3-5)
Most Americans think of the Fourth of July as Independence Day—but is it really the day the U.S. declared and celebrated independence? By exploring myths and truths surrounding Independence Day, this lesson asks students to think critically about commonly believed stories regarding the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the Independence Day holiday.

Myth and Truth: The “First Thanksgiving” (6-8)
Behind every myth are many possible truths allowing us to discover who we were as peoples and who we are today. By exploring myths surrounding the Wampanoag, the pilgrims, and the "First Thanksgiving," this lesson asks students to think critically about commonly believed myths regarding the Wampanoag Indians in colonial America.

Myth and Truth: The Gettysburg Address (9-12)
Did Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope on the train ride from D. C. to Gettysburg? Was the crowd disappointed with his short speech? Did he consider the speech a failiure? By exploring these and other myths, this lesson asks students to explore the “facts” behind this important speech and how history is recorded.

Name That Chapter! Discussing Summary and Interpretation Using Chapter Titles (9-12)
Students name chapters in novels that they are reading, creating a cumulative list for the novel as they proceed. Sample titles are discussed and debated before the class settles on a choice. In the process, students actively explore reading comprehension, summary, paraphrase, accuracy, and connotation.

Naming in a Digital World: Creating a Safe Persona on the Internet (9-12)
To introduce the connotations attached to names, this lesson begins by asking students to explore the origin of their first, middle, and last names. After considering the ways that people in various situations react to names, explore naming conventions in digital and non-digital settings then choose and explain specific names and profiles to represent themselves online.

Novel News: Broadcast Coverage of Character, Conflict, Resolution, and Setting (9-12)
This twist on readers theater invites students to prepare original news programs based on incidents in a recent reading. Along the way, students explore standard literary elements of character, conflict, resolution, and setting.

Onomatopoeia: A Figurative Language Mini-lesson (9-12)
In this mini-lesson, students are introduced to the literary device of onomatopoeia and explore how the technique adds to a writer’s message. Students examine Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells,” looking for examples of these “sound words”; then they apply their knowledge to additional poems, other readings, or their own compositions.

Paying Attention to Technology: Exploring a Fictional Technology (9-12)
Students complete a short survey to establish their beliefs about technology then compare their opinions to the ideas in a novel that depicts technology (such as 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, REM World, or Feed). By exploring the fictional technology, students are urged to think more deeply about their own beliefs and to pay attention to the ways that technology is described and used.

Paying Attention to Technology: Reviewing a Technology (9-12)
Students profile a familiar technology to create a technology review that explores when and how the technology might be used. The lesson can be used for literary analysis of a text that highlights a particular technology or for the interrogation and evaluation of a specific technology that the student or others use.

Paying Attention to Technology: Writing Technology Autobiographies (9-12)
In this lesson plan, students brainstorm lists of their interactions with technology, map these interactions graphically, and then compose narratives of their most significant interactions with technology. By writing these technology autobiographies, students explore what their stories reveal about why we use the technologies we do when we choose to use them.

Peer Review: Narrative (6-8)
"I liked the story about you and Paul. I think you should add a little more detail and you should change the end two sentences so it will sound better." Sound familiar? This student response to a peer's draft is all too typical. The PQP technique—Praise–Question–Polish—encourages student writers to find and correct their own errors, using self-editing knowledge to empower them as writers, rather than asking them to make others' corrections.

Persuading an Audience: Writing Effective Letters to the Editor (9-12)
Students write a persuasive letter to the editor of a newspaper, focusing on a current local or national issue and requesting a specific action or response.

Persuading Readers with Endorsement Letters (9-12)
Students explore the genre of commercial endorsements and then write letters of endorsement for products or services that they use.

Picture Books as Framing Texts: Research Paper Strategies for Struggling Writers (6-8)
In this lesson, picture books give students frames for structuring research projects, freeing them from the language of their encyclopedia sources and allowing them to focus their attention on the content of their papers. Using picture books as models, students are able to think more about what to say and less about how to say it, which leads to better learning experiences and better writing.

Plot Structure: A Literary Elements Mini-Lesson (6-8)
Using a triangle-shaped graphic organizer, Freytag’s Pyramid, students explore the basic literary element of plot. The graphic organizer helps students identify narrative structures that are familiar and compare those structures to those that authors use when composing a story.

Reading and Analyzing Multigenre Texts (6-8)
In this lesson plan, students develop a definition of multigenre texts by exploring a multigenre picture book, short chapter books, and, if desired, multigenre novels. Students will brainstorm alone and together what they will need as readers to read and understand multigenre texts successfully. The students will share findings and discuss strategies needed to comprehend, and by extension to write, these texts.

She Did What? Revising for Connotation (6-8)
Did she walk, skip, amble, dance? In this mini-lesson, students examine the simple sentence "She walked into the room." Students act out ways that the student in the sentence might enter the room, revising the sample sentence to increase the specificity of the word and explore connotation. Students follow this demonstration by selecting words with powerful connotations for their own writing.

Spend a Day in My Shoes: Exploring the Role of Perspective in Narrative (9-12)
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus explains to Scout that "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Make this advice more literal by inviting students to imagine spending a day in someone else's shoes in this writing activity.

Star-Crossed Lovers Online: Romeo and Juliet for a Digital Age (9-12)
Explore the modern significance of an older text, such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, by asking students to create their own modern interpretation of specific events from the drama. The lesson provides a range of possible projects that students can complete, including writing headline news stories, rewriting dialogue or monologues to include one form of interactive technology, and creating digital artifacts for modern-day versions of the characters from the play.

Style: Defining and Exploring an Author’s Stylistic Choices  (9-12)
Exploring the use of style in literature helps students understand how language conveys mood, images, and meaning. In this activity, students will find examples of specific stylistic devices in sample literary passages then search for additional examples and explore the reasons for the stylistic choices that the author has made.

Style: Translating Stylistic Choices from Hawthorne to Hemingway and Back Again (9-12)
In this activity, students work in small groups to explore the stylistic choices an author makes by translating passages of one author into the style of another, then translating fables into the style of one of the authors they have been reading.

Teaching the Epic through Ghost Stories (9-12)
Our oral tradition of telling ghost stories, with which most students are familiar, builds a useful bridge to the oral tradition of the ancient epic narrators. In this lesson, students connect to epic storytellers by sharing their own oral tales of ghosts and goblins and monsters.

Tracking the Ways Writers Develop Heroes and Villains (9-12)
After considering how the Star Wars character Darth Vader is cast as a villain, students read novels in small groups and track aspects of character development. After reading, students create a presentation that shares how a trait is developed for a character in their reading.

Unlocking the Underlying Symbolism and Themes of a Dramatic Work (9-12)
This lesson plan invites students to explore a character from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and an object associated with that character through story mapping and character-item poems. These graphic organizers and poems then become important keys to unlocking the underlying symbolism and themes in Hansberry’s play. By allowing students to discover these keys on their own, this activity encourages students to take responsibility for making meaning of the texts that they read.

Webcams in the Classroom: Animal Inquiry and Observation (3-5)
Can't make it to a zoo? Observe animal habits and habitats using one of the many webcams broadcasting from zoos and aquariums around the United States and the world in this inquiry-based activity that focuses on observation logs, class discussion, questioning, and research.

Weekly Writer’s Blogs: Building a Reflective Community of Support (9-12)
In this digital rethinking of the traditional weekly writer’s logs, students analyze example writer’s blog entries then begin the habit of writing their own reflective weekly entries, which focus on the writing that they have done over the past seven days.

Writing about Writing: An Extended Metaphor Assignment (9-12)
Using Richard Wilbur’s poem “The Writer” as an inspiration, students examine the literary element of metaphor then write their own extended metaphor, describing themselves as writers.