Activate scholars' knowledge of prefixes and suffixes with a matching game that challenges learners to identify meanings, build words, and write and illustrate sentences. 

Class members play an interactive game, matching strips of paper containing rhetorical devices with examples from César Chávez use rhetoric in his 1984 speech, "Address to the Commonwealth Club of California." Next, partners discuss...

It's time to level up and discover how video games affect the brain. Pupils explore the topic as they continue reading excerpts from an article about adolescent brain development and the digital revolution. Scholars also participate in a...

Stanchion, spar, spinnaker. Right wing, sweeper, hip check. Every subject has specialized vocabulary. Here’s a fun way to introduce your learners to this jargon. Provide class groups with newspapers and have them search pre-selected...

Few studies have captured the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, such as Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Tenth graders read "Rules of the Game," which describes Waverly's youth in chess tournaments, and compare how she...

Prepare for a mid-unit assessment based on Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club with a brainstorming and discussion lesson plan. Focused on two chapters from the novel ("Rules of the Game" and "Two Kinds"), the lesson plan guides tenth graders...

The second part of a two-part lesson on irregular past tense verbs prompts language learners to add four more verbs to the list of twelve they have been working with.

Run quickly. Walk slowly. Jump high. As part of their study of English parts of speech, language learners engage in a series of activities designed to introduce them to the descriptive power of adverbs.

The ancient Greeks used performance enhancing drugs, such as opium juice, when they participated in the original Olympic Games. Pupils research a website with debate topics to decide if athletes' use of such drugs in modern sports is...

Monster trucks, action figures, and video games. Are these toys designed for boys or girls? Scholars work in small groups to find and categorize examples of boy and girl toys from catalogs. Next, learners analyze the two sets of pictures...

Here is a terrific lesson on teaching homophones to your upper graders! In it, homophone word cards and homophone bingo cards, which are embedded in the lesson, are used in a game format which reinforces this important part of speech....

And in this corner we have Little Jack Horner. Engage your learners with phonemic awareness activities that encourage them to play with language. Eight different categories of phonemic awareness activities are detailed in the resource...

Here is an inventive, and easy-to-implement lesson on the writing of topic sentences. Learners review what a topic sentence is, practice identifying topic sentences in an informational article, then play a really cool game. All of the...

Can literacy get any more fun than this? Learners not only have fun, but gain confidence as well when presented with familiar text in another language. Select books, songs, poems, even recipes written in another language, and using the...

In his 2013 introduction to Fahrenheit 451, Neil Gaiman states, “Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” In this extraordinary unit plan, readers "explore the power of written language to educate and...

One, two, three. Un, deux, trois. Eins, zwei, drei. Primary learners love to count and this lesson contains a series of games that encourage learners to count in English, French, German, and Spanish. The exercises develop literacy and...

While playing a long-term game of Goal-O Bingo, your class will practice replacing unkind words with kind ones. First, read Casey and Amazing Giant Green Shirt by Margaret Ross. Then have your class write down 25 goals they would...

Consider how well students' favorite TV shows, movies and video games reflect the diversity of society. The lesson introduces your class to several media literacy concepts, such as how media conveys values and messages, as well as the...

What do dominoes and phonemes have in common? Quite a bit in this engaging phonics game! Each domino has a letter on one side and an image on the other. Everything you need is here; partners place the starting domino on the table then...

Here is a phoneme segmenting game which incorporates drawing for your more artistic learners. Assemble the spinner using a brad and lay out the picture cards face up. Partners take turns spinning to get either two, three, four, or five....

Segmenting and blending phonemes helps budding readers understand words. Use this strategy in an engaging game where partners test each other's auditory processing using familiar words. Using picture cards and a chart (included),...

Segmenting words into different phonemes helps kids on the road to reading and writing. Have some fun with this spinner game which includes all the print-outs you will need. Simply assemble the spinner using a brad and lay out the...

Finding engaging ways to help your middle schoolers build their vocabulary is not easy to do. The lesson presented here offers a great way to motivate them to build vocabulary by making it into a game. Teams of pupils use a dictionary...