Students analyze the Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "We Real Cool" and then write about how the character's pool hall days might influence who the character becomes fifty years in the future.
Many Years Later: Responding to Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool"
The Day Jimmy's Boa Taught Cause and Effect
This lesson introduces the concept of cause and effect with Trinka Hakes Noble's books about Jimmy and his boa constrictor.
Connecting Past and Present: A Local Research Project
In this unit, students become active archivists, gathering photos, artifacts, and stories for a museum exhibit that highlights one decade in their school's history.
Creative Problem-Solving with Ezra Jack Keats
Using books by Ezra Jack Keats as inspiration, students explore problems and solutions through read-alouds, discussion, and an interactive bulletin board.
The Children's Picture Book Project
In this lesson students evaluate published children's picture storybooks. Students then plan, write, illustrate, and publish their own children's picture books.
Bio-graph: Graphing Life Events
Students interview other students, choose significant life events, rate them, graph them, and write about one or more, in this activity that integrates mathematical graphing with writing.
Thinking Inductively: A Close Reading of Seamus Heaney's "Blackberry Picking"
This lesson eases students' fear of interpreting complex poetry by teaching them a strategy with which they determine patterns of imagery, diction, and figurative language in order to unlock meaning.
Love of War in Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story"
Students explore the theme of love of war through texts on camaraderie among soldiers. They then compose a visual collage depicting their beliefs about the relationship between love and war.
More than One Way to Create Vivid Verbs
This lesson teaches students how to use old verbs in a new way, thus creating new and fresh descriptive phrases.
When Less IS More—Understanding Minimalist Fiction
This lesson pairs Ernest Hemingway's short story "Cat in the Rain' with Raymond Carver's "Little Things" to guide students to an understanding of the characteristics of minimalist fiction.
Assessing Cultural Relevance: Exploring Personal Connections to a Text
As a class, students evaluate a nonfiction or realistic fiction text for its cultural relevance to themselves personally and as a group.
Brochures: Writing for Audience and Purpose
Students create brochures on the same topic as another piece of writing they have done, highlighting how shifting purposes and audiences creates changes in their strategies as writers.
Family Memoir: Getting Acquainted With Generations Before Us
Creating a memoir of an older family member allows students both to learn more about their own backgrounds and to learn the power of storytellers.
Exploring Irony in the Conclusion of All Quiet on the Western Front
After reading All Quiet on the Western Front, students discuss the novel's ironic ending, then compose alternate titles and endings for the book, and design new book covers.
Supporting Vocabulary Development with EASE
This lesson allows teachers to enrich students' oral and written vocabulary using the EASE sequence of instruction: Enunciate, Associate, Synthesize, and Emphasize the words you want students to use.
Enchanting Readers with Revisionist Fairy Tales
Students examine three examples of revisionist fairy tales in which female characters act in empowered roles rather than behaving helpless and submissive.
Walt Whitman as a Model Poet: "I Hear My School Singing"
Students first analyze Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," then use Whitman's poem as a model as they create their own list poems.
The ABCs of Poetry
Students examine a letter of the alphabet from all angles, creating image pools of original metaphors that they then turn into poems.
The Feature Story—Fifteen Minutes (and 500 Words) of Fame!
Students learn how to differentiate between a news story and a feature story by writing a profile of a classmate.
Letters and Learning Genre
Using their prior knowledge of books containing letters, students show their understanding of genre by rewriting a story and reflecting on how traditional stories differs from stories told in letters.