Help your seventh graders relate the ELA Common Core standards to their own learning with these "I Can" statement posters. Each standard has been translated into a statement that pupils can understand and placed on its own page for...

Groups create a set for a play or story they select, build a model, and share their stage with the class. The team explains the rationale for their choices and the mood they feel their staging creates.

Students explore the story of the Gingerbread Man, and compare the story's neighbors and neighborhoods with those of their school. They bake Gingerbread Friends cookies, retell the story, take a neighborhood walk, and create a class book.

Barbara Joosse approaches an age-old question through an equally traditional culture in her story Mama, Do You Love Me?, which helps budding readers explore Native American vocabulary in context. Here you'll find...

The loggerhead turtle is a fascinating species, and budding readers learn all about it in Nicola Davies' account One Tiny Turtle. This informational narrative offers excellent vocabulary in context, and you'll...

Students are able to identifty items that use electricity. They identify 10 household items that run on electricity. Students understand and articulate that electricity is to be respected. Electricity is helpful, but it also can cause...

Prime your Autistic or special education pupil with this image-rich vocabulary preview. To be used with the story, Three Little Pigs, these cards each contain an image and the associated word or phrase that relates to the story.

Who doesn't love this book? A Pocket for Corduroy provides excellent vocabulary practice in context for budding readers (although this strategy could be used with any text). Before reading it aloud, go over the new...

Combine counting and vocabulary using Francine Bassede's book George's Store at the Shore, which has learners exploring new words and numbers 1-10. Suggested words for this text are: arrange, assortment, customers,...

When choosing what foods to eat, there are a lot of factors to consider. To help make the decision a little easier, young learners work in small groups developing short plays, stories, or advertisements that address the different issues...

Are you in need of a new way to teach learners sequence of events and how to interpret a character's external motivations? Why not engage them in dramatic play? The class will use tableaux to convey the sequence of events in a familiar...

A reader's journal can help pupils comprehend, connect to, and remember a text. Have them follow the prompts here to write journal entries for any literary text.

Terror, mystery, excitement. American writers of the 19th century, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, used these elements to create morally ambiguous tales that challenged the prevailing belief in...

Students listen to and read legends and see that these legends helped the Aboriginals explain their everyday life. Through their stories and legends we find that Aboriginal values, attitudes and cultural identities are shared.

Students complete a variety of activities related to the folktale from India, "The Drum." They listen to the story and answer comprehension questions, construct a coffee can drum, and complete a phonics and matching worksheet.

Little literature analysts listen as you read The Giving Tree to them and discuss other ways the tree could have helped the little boy.A three-column chart is given to each individual showing what the tree and boy gave to each...

Take a journey to India with a read aloud of The Drum: A Folktale from India by Rob Cleveland. Make connections to the story's theme by building and practicing drums, role playing story characters, and practicing skills in phonics, math,...

Read the story of Roger Robot included in the lesson and have kids move creatively by interpreting how a robot might move. Read a part of the story, then stop and let the class act it out. Read some more, and let them move some more....

Robots and their interactions with their human counterparts are the catalyst for a fun writing lesson. First, the class brainstorms what they'd like to have their personal robot do or be capable of. Then, they each write a humorous story...

What media literacy skills do people need to evaluate a news source? Scholars listen to and discuss an NPR story about how fake headlines often dupe young people and adults alike. Next, they study news stories, using a fact-checking...

After readers finish the story Deep-Sea Monster, they utilize this two-page worksheet to write short-answer responses to questions about the story. The questions posed require critical thinking, not simply recalling details from the...

Albert Bierstadt's painting Wind River Country shows viewers how a reader progresses through a story. Your class studies the light and dark areas, how the eye moves across the painting, and what attracts the audience to the work, and...

Why are some people such good story tellers? Help youngsters demonstrate the art of storytelling. They start off by listening to a story and sharing what they noticed about the storytelling that made it exciting. Then, they study a story...

Dander from the show Twisted Whiskers and characters from My Little Pony are featured in this three part lesson that explores using story pyramids to scaffold ideas, adding sensory details to enrich writing, and editing using common...