It's wonderful to see a lesson that incorporates art, movement, and writing. These three forms of creative expression are explored as learners dance to music from the Gullah people of West Africa. They analyze several paintings, listen...

Color, light and shadow, the placement and size of objects. These are some of the tools artists used to tell their stories. Model for learners how to read a painting by closely examining these features. The richly detailed packet...

Encourage close reading of the text and a focus on how Sandra Cisneros' develops her characters with an activity that asks teams to sort, group, and label character descriptions from The House on Mango Street.

Introduce learners to allegorical art with four bronze sculptures by Francesco Bertos. After modeling how to recognize bias and allegory in Bertos' Africa, class groups examine the other three sculptures in the series before creating...

A classic Japanese print is attached to this lesson and its up to your class to write a story about it. Pretending the image is an illustration, they use what they know about Japanese mythology to compose a short story describing the...

Students examine the use of adjectives in a product review, then write their own descriptive review. In this writing and word usage lesson, students first analyze the choice of adjectives in a New York Times article about the iPhone,...

Students practice writing descriptions by researching various artifacts from ancient Egypt and writing captions for them. They read and discuss the Times article, King Tut, Museum Trailblazer, Begins Encore.

Students describe places using language that is as vivid as possible. They will examine the writer's craft in describing a place by reading and discussing "Resurrecting the Miner's World." They will then revise their descriptive pieces...

Students explore art when it is used as a source of information about society and material culture. They communicate with students in a foreign country, and share ideas and experiences in order to create drawings of their homes to exchange.

I absolutely love this idea. Kids explore the chiaroscuro technique as they draw, then bite, then write about an apple. They discuss chiaroscuro, depth, shade, perspective, and texture. Then they draw their apples, write a descriptive...

Students discover enunciation and alliteration by reading tongue twisters in class.  In this language arts lesson, students listen and repeat some of the classic childhood tongue twisters along with their teacher.  Students...

You can't read Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory without craving the rich treats described in Dahl's vivid prose. Young writers try their hands at sensory language with a lesson plan that prompts them to write about...

Learning how to draw inferences from text is a key reading comprehension skill. Here's a worksheet that gives readers a chance to practice by offering 20 descriptive sentences and asking kids to identify the inferred character...

Learn about the ancient Near East through a close examination of ancient artifacts. Lead your class into analysis by first observing an artifact as a class. Pupils can then work in pairs to analyze the other artifacts and compile a list...

Esther Forbes' award-winning Revolutionary War novel, Johnny Tremain and excerpts from Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine are used to model how imagery brings alive the setting of a story. The young writers then craft their...

Full of informative, helpful, and accessible activities, a language arts packet is sure to be a valuable part of your writing unit. It's versatile between reading levels and grade levels, and focuses on the most efficient ways for your...

A woven rug depicting birds and cornstalks becomes the inspiration for a instructional activity on critical thinking and creative writing. Learners analyze the symbolism found in the rug and then compose a descriptive paragraph or poem...

Instruct your readers to scrounge through the pages of Maniac Magee in search for descriptive passages or words they may use to write poetry. As they look for meaningful, sensory descriptors in Jerry Spinelli's novel, readers...

Scholars take part in two exercises to boost their knowledge of personification. After reading a detailed description and excerpts from famous poems, writers list action verbs and objects then combine words to create a humorous...

The three R's are, reduce, reuse, and recycle. Third graders use recycled materials to design and create an environmentally themed piece of art. They discuss and examine major art works that were created using recycled materials, then...

Middle schoolers are encourage to try their hand at traditional Oceania tapa art by crafting their own cloth using brown paper bags. Included in the resource is background information about the cultures of Oceania and their art. 

Combine a study of biography writing with some tips for spicing up writing. After reading two passages, one much more descriptive than the other, pupils examine what makes one more interesting. They then brainstorm some ideas for writing...

Your class will find using similes as easy as pie after completing this figurative language exercise. Provided with a list of incomplete similes, young writers must use their creativity to fill in the blanks with nouns that accurately...