Help early readers identify rhyming words in nursery rhymes. They will read the nursery rhyme Three Little Kittens Who Lost Their Mittens in order to identify rhyming words. Then they chart the rhyming words they heard in the...

 Students research people who have contributed to making life better for the disabled.  In this advocacy lesson students enter the names of advocates on cards and divide into groups. Students complete a worksheet...

Students determine the workings of the Braille alphabet and how people with visual impairments learn how to use it. For this Braille lesson, students study the associated vocabulary, read about Helen Keller, and complete associated...

Challenge your class with this lesson! Learners read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, discuss context clues, identify main ideas and details, and analyze story elements. Discussion questions and activities are broken down for each chapter...

Break this presentation into two or three days so as not to overwhelm your kids. Fifty-four slides is a lot of slides, but the PowerShow is well-organized, and terms are defined clearly and illustrated in examples provided. A general...

As you work through Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, try out some or all of the 20 questions and activities included here. Useful for discussion questions, group assignments, or individual projects, this resource covers plot as...

This is a fantastic collection of a wide variety of rubrics for writing, listening, and speaking! The resource contains over 14 rubrics for assessing such items as a summary, autobiographical sketch and narrative, speech, oral...

Use a series of extension activities to enhance your class reading of Chris Van Allsburg's holiday classic, The Polar Express. From a biography of the author to filmed book reviews and research about the railroad, kids can take...

Whether you are teaching mainstream, advanced, or intervention language arts classes, you will find something helpful in a thorough writing packet. It includes prompts, rubrics, responses, helpful hints, graphic organizers, and many...

How does an author's choice of artistic medium influence an audience? What about how an author chooses to transform original source material? These are the questions class members grapple with as they compare scenes from episode IV...

Class members compare the final 30 minutes of Lucas's Star Wars: A New Hope with Act V of Doescher's play, William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope and consider how the choice of media influences viewers' impression...

"First Appearance," Mark Twain's tale about overcoming stage fright, serves as a model of a personal narrative and gets young writers thinking about milestones in their own lives. After examining student models and considering the...

True passion can drive you mad. Stephen Dedalus, the main character in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man straddles many lines, including those between sanity and insanity, piety and sin, and individuality...

Third graders gain an appreciation for writing, analyzing, reading and listening to poetry, viewing poems as a motivation for studying Japanese culture and tradition. They study and create their own haiku and tanka poems with illustrations.

Fourth graders demonstrate and evaluate the six traits of writing. They read and identify good writing and bad writing, utilize a rubric to self-evaluate their own writing, participate in a Reader's Theater, and publish a class book.

Learners examine the gods and goddesses of Greek and Roman mythology. In groups, they use this information to participate in skits as they role-play the gods and goddesses. To end the lesson, they draw their own caricature of their...

Tenth graders explore the self through a study of autobiographies. By writing daily in their journals, they improve their writing skills and write reflection pieces at the end of the year. Through a series of writing assignments, 10th...

Learners describe a pretend animal. They read "The After School Monster." Students read other books and discuss whether or not the characters are real. Learners make a drawing of a pretend animal and of a real animal. They make up a...

Students examine the first two scenes of Act I and do a metaphor interpretation exercise. They write an essay on the following question: Through Iago's metaphors, what is he trying to do to Brabantio? To answer this question they ...

Students are introduced to the characteristics of the short story. Individually, they use their own personal experiences to write a poem about their families to get them used to writing. Next, they practice reading various short...

Twelfth graders engage in a ten-month long elective course focusing on college board review and an advanced writing workshop. Both course components focus on thinking and reasoning skills. Various approaches include sentence combining,...

Learners explore the concept of philanthropy. In this service learning instructional activity, students read stories and then discuss the meaning of philanthropy as they identify ways the characters contribute to the common good.

Fourth graders read classic stories including "The Magic Brocade" and "St. George and the Dragon". They complete a series of lessons in which they compare stories and produce original narrative legends.

Learners examine the issues facing children in society. In groups, they participate in a simulation to discover the lack of connection between child-support and how it affects the children and society as a whole. To end the lesson...