Poetry is everywhere you look! Create found poems using headlines from newspapers and magazines. Young poetry focus on creating alliterative phrases with words they find in headlines, tying their poems to a central theme.

Analyze magazines as a class, looking carefully for the target audience, advertisements, and topics presented. Small groups then work as a publication team and receive a magazine that they have to "sell." Each individual has a different...

Students work through a Haiku Organizer to determine the characteristics they use to write eight haiku poems on a theme that they choose. They design presentation folders of their completed work.

Now these are learning activities full of fun, art, and cultural exploration. Kids consider the art of storytelling through comic book images. They then look at the Tale of Genji as it was written in the 11th century. They discuss...

Let's Look Around! is the theme of a unit that offers a plethora of challenge activities. Enhance your scholars' learning experiences and reinforce concepts with activities such as writing a book about farm animals, an...

Students complete a variety of activities related to the letter A. They trace the letter A on a worksheet, paint the letter A, create an apple print painting, cut out and glue magazine pictures of things starting with the letter A, and...

Color, color, everywhere. As part of a three-week study of color, kindergarteners create animal color cards, design pages for an class animal book, populate an underwater scene with colorful fish, and invent and name a new color. 

Looking for a great lesson 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...

Young writers generate descriptive words. They use pictures of various landscapes (from books, magazines, or the Internet) and complete a story pyramid. The pyramid (included here) asks to describe the main character, the setting, and...

The text structure is vitally important when crafting a rise in tension. Explore Sophocles' choice to order his events in a particular sequence with a instructional activity about Oedipus the King. As the light of realization dawns on...

Carlos Fuentes’s The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait and Jaspre Bark’s Journal of Inventions: Leondardo da Vince serve as models for an assignment that asks class members to create a personal journal they will use...

Learners discuss their personal connections with stories they've read in the past and identify techniques to connect with more stories. They create illustrations, construct task cards, and complete sentence stems based on books they read...

Down on the Farm is the theme of this series of challenge activities. Extend your scholars' learning experience with engaging activities such as designing a farm, creating collages, writing poems and to-do lists, and playing dominoes.

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.

Students read accounts of children during the Holocaust and read Elie Wiesel's "Night". Using the internet, they share ideas and discuss topics with peers across the nation. They examine the role of the individual in the Holocaust and...

Students read and prepare a new oral version of a selected fairy tale. They read and compare/contrast two fairy tales and identify the main story elements. In small groups they create a new oral version of one they fairy tales and...

It’s poetry T.I.M.E! Individuals use the T.I.M.E. format (T = Title, thought, and theme;  I = Imagery and figurative language; M = music and sound; E = emotion) to study a poet, collect poems that have a similar theme, and create a...

Prophecy and blindness often go hand in hand, as in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. Explore Oedipus' thoughts about prophecy, fate, and responsibility with an activity focused on the discussion between Creon and Oedipus regarding the murder...

Use photography to inspire similes and metaphors. Kids rifle through magazines and pictures you've brought to use them as inspiration. They choose two and create a metaphor or simile to accompany their display. Consider hanging these on...

Students use Moodle to participate in a chat session to complete a character analysis for a novel they've studied. In this novel analysis and technology lesson, students are assigned a character from a specific chapter and use Moodle to...

Pupils use reading strategies for Night of the Twister. In this reading strategies lesson, students name five major catastrophes and books about each. Pupils complete a vocabulary section, make inferences and predictions, read the story...

Students examine wordless books and other pictures in order to learn how the teacher "reads a picture" to tell a story about it. In this early writing lesson, students then create their own picture for story telling by painting....