The best poetry writing lesson of all time is here for you! Learn all about the art of exaggeration with a lesson on exaggeration poems, which instructs students to use wild imagery to convey their message.

Make a study of the First Amendment and its relationship to freedom. Pupils rewrite the amendment and discuss the central idea before focusing on a specific phrase. After discussing, class members write a journal entry about the included...

Put together an English language arts unit on the six traits of writing with this helpful collection of resources. From fun songs to differentiated writing exercises reinforcing each of the traits, great ideas are provided for...

Explore the works of Dr. Seuss, such as Horton Hears a Who, Horton Hatches and Egg, The Sneetches and Other Stories, The Lorax, The Butter Battle Book, and Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. Each story lesson includes reading...

Lesson five in the series focuses on syntax and the elements that make sentences enjoyable. Learners practice building different clauses and phrases and using figures of speech and rhetorical and literary devices.

Building on the previous activity in this series of lesson seeds, this plan focuses on the use of dialect in Theodore Taylor's novel, The Cay. Class members examine specific lines of text, use their reading journals to respond to the...

Celebrate poetry month all of April with a guide that uses six of Shel Silverstein's most famous books as a basis for the lessons. Discussion questions and writing activities are provided for each of Silverstein's books.

The fourth standard for reading literature in the Common Core calls for young readers to be able to determine the figurative and connotative meanings of words and phrases. Use this resource, a continuation of a series of Common Core...

Learners follow five steps to compose an alliteration poem. They choose one consonant and brainstorm as many nouns, verbs, and adjectives they can think of to create rhyming sentences that come together in a poetic fashion. 

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...

Extend the exhilarating learning experience of Dr. Seuss with five activities designed to reinforce literacy skills—site word reading, dialogue writing, story mapping, and more! Featured stories include The Lorax,...

Writing funny poems is the best part about learning poetic forms! Young poets learn all about clerihews—humorous four-line poems about people—with an explanatory lesson.

Visit the Magic Treehouse and take your class on a trip through time with a reading of the children's book Mummies in the Morning. Using the story to spark an investigation into Egyptian culture, this literature unit engages...

A creative way bring autobiographical writing to your poetry unit or back-to-school curriculum, this lesson plan guides you through a bio poem activity. Kids use the graphic organizer to describe themselves using adjectives, things...

Choose from a variety of phonological activities to complement a reading lesson. The guide goes through the basic components of good phonics instruction focusing on sound types, levels of phonological awareness, assessment methods,...

What makes a good leader? Use the curriculum guide for William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to help scholars answer that question. Pupils research the play's historical context and other background information before engaging in...

Scholars stretch their writing muscles with an exercise that asks them to describe the sky using similes and metaphors. 

Look back at the third chapter of The Cay with your class. Pupils will conduct a close reading, taking a second look at a chunk of text and responding to a series of text-dependent questions. Wrap up with an analytical writing prompt...

Use Langston Hughes's poem, "Words Like Freedom," to explore the concepts of freedom and liberty. Learners read the poem, determine the theme, and use the provided graphic organizer to examine the connotative and denotative meanings of...

Pairs of contradictory words introduce learners to paradoxes, the literary device writers use to get readers thinking deeply about their messages. An interactive lesson uses poems by Emily Dickinson and Wilfred Owen and excerpts from the...

Draw back the curtain, add a spot of joy to your class, and let learners be instructional activityed by a close reading exercise that models how to develop an interpretation based on evidence drawn from a text. Robert Browning’s dramatic...

Puzzling over what geometry lesson to teach next? Look no further. This simple activity teaches young mathematicians how shapes can be decomposed into smaller figures, and how smaller figures can be assembled into larger shapes. To learn...

It's amazing the complex figures that can be made using only a few simple shapes. Following a class reading of the children's book Grandfather Tang's Story by Ann Tompert, young mathematicians use sets of tangrams to create models...

All shapes have certain defining attributes that set them apart from others. In order to understand this, young mathematicians look at examples and non-examples of triangles, rectangles, and squares, working as a whole class to create...