Thirty-six pages familiarize scholars with the story and vocabulary of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. After reading and listening to an abbreviated version of the holiday tale learners show what they know about the sequence...

Finding engaging ways to help your middle schoolers build their vocabulary is not easy to do. The activity presented here offers a great way to motivate them to build vocabulary by making it into a game. Teams of pupils use a dictionary...

Scholars demonstrate their knowledge of root words aqua and aud, and develop vocabulary skills by completing of a chart, handout, and worksheet using creative thinking skills, a dictionary, and a thesaurus.   

Lois Lowry's The Giver is one of the most engaging and thought-provoking works of literature in the middle school curriculum. Round out your novel unit with a collection of reading activities, comprehension questions, memoir and...

A study of Alfred Noyes's poem "The Highwayman" opens a lesson about narrative poetry. Scholars read the poem and compare it to the animated video version using a worksheet. Learners look at models and use a template to craft an "I Am"...

Given a deck of cards with different words printed, pairs draw cards and work together to locate definitions for each multiple-meaning word. Learners complete a worksheet that challenges them to write the word, two of its definitions,...

The first lesson of a five-lesson unit designed for eighth graders has class members reading and watching a video of Edgar Allen Poe's narrative poem, "The Raven." They then craft their narrative poem, illustrate it, and share their work...

A class discussion on reference materials opens up a activity on how to use these important resources. They discover that dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauruses are called word reference resources, and they practice using them. The...

"Timid, scared, terrified." High school scholars examine words, their denotations and connotations, in a series of exercises that use lines from Shakespeare to explore figurative language and word relationships. Participants then...