Life changes may cause stress. Here, scholars identify stressful situations in a peer's life and offer coping skills to make for a better day. A short story, "Stressed Out Sally," provides pupils with a look inside a bad day. After...

Combine participial phrases and creative writing with this lesson, which is equally helpful for writing skills and conventions. After a mini-lesson on participial phrases and reading the picture book Dancing in the Wings, pupils use a...

A video leads off this activity on fables, introducing the class to this important form of traditional storytelling. The group defines fable and hears an explanation of the origin of this type of folk tale. They summarize the story they...

Who is Doctor DeSoto? Start by playing a video clip (included). Discuss different methods of persuasion, and then analyze two different persuasive letter examples. What should your class be looking for? Send them off to work in groups...

Sarah Stewart’s The Gardener and Food from Farms by Nancy Dickmann display the importance of community farms. After reading these short picture books, class members draw connections between farms and the food we eat each day. As a...

After having a bad day, Sally took scholars' suggestions and had a super day. Pupils listen to her newest short story then discuss the events that occurred. They sort each event by what was in her control and what was not. Participants...

This may be a lot to ask of a high schooler, but then again, who knows? Pupils work in groups to explore, write, and then perform an original opera. They view versions of The Magic Flute and La Traviata, then compose a plot, characters,...

Direct instruction on punctuation rules for titles is followed by collaborative practice in class. Two worksheets with aesthetically engaging graphic design provide practice. For 12 examples, small groups either underline, italicize, or...

High schoolers are asked to consider the connections between food, culture, and identity. They read articles and share what they learned in a jigsaw activity, read a short story, and make a claim about the story's theme, backing up their...

November is National Novel Writing Month, so if your young authors are embarking on this journey, be sure they understand plot elements. This collaborative lesson fits into the context of the larger NaNoWriMo project; however, the ideas...

Students create short stories and make stick puppets to act it out. After editing their stories, they glue used CDs or DVDs to popsicle sticks and decorate them as the story characters. Finally, students present their puppet shows to...

Madness, violence, despair—the titular character of Shakespeare's Macbeth is spiraling out of control. Pupils first explore the topic with a collaborative jigsaw discussion. At the end of the instructional activity, they write about how...

"Who am I?" Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Necklace," Julio Naboa Polanco's poem "Identity," and a clip from a Jason Bourne film provide learners with a context to consider the traits that makeup identity. Scholars create a...

Young scholars read and comprehend a piece of fictional writing, analyze how setting, characterization, and plot affect the theme of a story and work in a group to create a new writing assignment. This 5-day plan culminates in students...

Students, after reading and discussing the two texts by Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People" and "Greenleaf," analyze the plot, tone, characters, themes and setting in each story. They write their own short stories dealing with a...

Students choose a short story or book and a student takes on the role of one of the characters in the story. They complete an interview worksheet and then students question each other further about the character they are playing.

Middle schoolers differentiate between fiction and non-fiction, discuss historical fiction, which combines both genres, choose historical novel from list and read independently, and write original short stories that combine elements of...

Students translate an entire Internet page from English into a target language. In small groups, they create a short story or document in their native tongue or find an Internet page in their own tongue that they translate into English.

Young scholars examine the consequences of time travel through the analysis of the short story "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury. They watch a PowerPoint presentation, conduct Internet research on endangered ecosystems, and create a...

Who would you love to see at your table? Groups research a decade, ranging from the 1840s to the 1960s, read a short story associated with that decade, and plan a dinner party, complete with table set-up and menu. After researching...

Students discuss with teacher how to complete a short story and the elements necessary: characters, settings, themes, and plots. They then use the worksheet to complete the short story.

Students read and analyze the twelve short stories in the novel "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes." They create their own detective that has to solve a new kind of crime, and write and edit a short story with their original detective as...

Learners create a Thanksgiving writing piece. In this holiday lesson, students use a turkey picture to write a short story about the things they are thankful for.

Students become familiar with writing an essay in English. They are given an overview of basic essay writing styles. Students develop skills that are used when analyzing texts as the basis of their essays.