Do your students love movies? Use Star Wars and Indiana Jones to introduce the use of Venn diagrams for comparing and contrasting. A list of words to indicate comparison or contrast are also included to help with the writing process.

Bring the imagery of the desert to your classroom with this ELL lesson plan. After reading Madeleine Dunphy’s Here in the Southwestern Desert, learners complete a graphic organizer about the features and images of the poem. The...

This shamrock-shaped graphic organizer helps students set up a limerick based on a few sample lines. Students are prompted on which lines should rhyme, and how many syllables each line should have. Once they are finished, the shamrocks...

This shamrock-shaped graphic organizer helps students set up a limerick based on a few sample lines. Students are prompted on which lines should rhyme, and how many syllables each line should have. Once they are finished, the shamrocks...

Students explore storytelling by conceptualizing a story with classmates. In this publishing lesson, students identify the idea development process and discuss word choice when writing a story. Students utilize a graphic organizer to...

Want to explore the process of writing a persuasive essay and tie it in with the upcoming elections? Class members use Venn diagrams and the hamburger model of persuasive writing to write a five-paragraph essay on elections and...

At the beginning of the instructional activity, the class discusses the central idea of a poem. After that, the teacher reads a poem, embedded in the plan, to the class. In groups of two or three, learners create their own poem in...

Introduce your class to fairy tales with this instructional activity. After reading the fractured fairy tale, "The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig," third, fourth, and fifth graders write a personal narrative as a response to the...

Ever sigh when learners ask why they have to know so many different forms of the quadratic equation? Here is a lesson that comes in handy! Using hands-on matching activities, quadratic equations are explored through...

Score a resource on ratios. Young mathematicians learn about different ways to express ratios. Using sports data, they write statements about the statistics in ratio form.

Set your class up for success with writing descriptive settings with these two graphic organizers. On the first page, writers note specifc details about their chosen setting and comment on how each character views the setting. The second...

Close up your study of Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science with a letter-writing assignment. Pupils prepare by journaling and sharing with a partner. They then compose letters that focus on a big idea from the...

Pre-reading worksheets, discussion prompts, activity ideas, research assignments, and more await you in this resource for supplementing your class reading of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a famous suffragette that paved the way for equal rights for women. Readers respond to before, during, and after reading questions based on her story. The resource is a great addition to a lesson plan...

Meant for use with Maya Angelou's first autobiographical volume I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the materials here are designed for a homeschool setting, but they'd suit any classroom or text. Graphic organizers, chapter summary...

Can you put that in writing? Scholars work with a partner to write a practice claim before writing their own claims. After writing their claims, learners share with class using a Concentric Circles activity.

What do Jeep advertisements and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath have in common? They both employ the art of the extended metaphor! Using the Six-Trait Writing model, learners begin to work on their own extended metaphors. Development...

This lesson is so beneficial it makes any teacher's heart skip a beat! After readers identify words from Words by Heart, they break down unknown vocabulary with a handout detailing various prefixes and suffixes. Once they finish...

West Side Story and Romeo & Juliet—two classics in their own rights that help young literature lovers better analyze different works. Learners research and compare the characters and story elements of West Side Story and Romeo...

Young researchers use the Internet or books to find out about colonial women during the American Revolution. They organize information in a graphic to demonstrate their understanding of the research they gathered before writing a...

Do pictures really last longer? A prompt from the 2001 AP® English Language and Composition Free-Response Questions asks scholars to analyze the opinion that photography actually limits people when it comes to understanding the world....

William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew combines three things that are sure to capture scholars' attention: love, deception, and clown attire. With the curriculum guide, learners hone their opinion-writing skills and...

It is not what you say but how you say it. Scholars use an essay prompt from the 2002 AP® English Language and Composition Free-Response Questions to analyze how an author uses language to describe her past. They also support or argue a...

Students compare and contrast a classic fairy tale with a fractured one and complete a graphic organizer. Then they write a persuasive essay following the steps of the writing process. Finally, students publish their completed essay and...