Students acquire a pen pal in a foreign country and write letters at least twice a month throughout the year to exchange with them. At the end of the year, they write an essay that compares one important difference and one important...

High schoolers start by drawing Mr. Essay Man, who is supposed to illustrate the different parts of an essay. After discussing what each component should contain, writers start their essay, guided by the teacher and class discussion....

Are you teaching a high school language arts class and stumped for writing topics? Five pages of writing prompts for all kinds of writing should help you out. Many of these prompts refer to texts that are not included in this resource,...

Practice persuasive writing skills in this thorough lesson. After selecting issues and discovering viewpoints, middle schoolers write letters or brochures created to express the individual's perspective. The ideas are presented to the...

To be used in connection with a group project or at the end of a unit, this handout contains two essay writing prompts. The first prompt asks a group of learners to work together to evaluate their groups' performance as well as each...

The similarities and differences between academic and everyday summaries/abstracts are explored in this PowerPoint. After reading "Historiographic Reflection on Israel’s Origins: The Rise and Fall of the Patriarchal Age,” and abstracts...

Are you teaching Modernism to your class? Connect different areas of artistic expression in the Modernist Era. Learners read T.S. Eliot, view art by Pablo Picasso, and listen to a Modernist musical composition. This final assignment is...

You've found the first grade Common Core jackpot! English Language Arts and Math Common Core standards are addressed in a 74-page packet complete with standard text printables, activities, cut-outs for the classroom, and worksheets. 

Technology—changing lives and transforming war. Your tech-loving historians examine photographs and primary documents to explore how technology changed not only World War I, but also how it moved society forward. They apply their...

Introduce your learners to the concept of a double-entry journal. Talk about how to connect with the text and model an example for them. Using whatever literature you are working with, have scholars choose a quote and make their own...

And now for the star witness! Scholars take a look at a model newspaper article and discuss the importance of eyewitness accounts. In groups of three, they take turns underlining text from eyewitnesses. They then regroup to talk about...

After completing Chapter 5 of Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, readers make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections to Victor Martinez's novel by crafting journal entries addressing comments and questions to characters in...

Encourage your readers to make connections between texts with this resource. After compiling notes for each text read (you choose the texts), groups craft skits in which major characters from each text meet. There is a rubric for the...

Readers of The Joy Luck Club, use a double-0entry journal to record and reflect on passages from Amy Tan's novel.

Elementary students with mild to moderate mental disabilities use a variety of tools to connect letter sounds to images. They use flash cards, posters, and writing while saying to connect letter image to phonemic equivalent. Then, they...

Transitions, words that reveal the relationship between two ideas, are the subject of a presentation that provides color-coded illustrations to show viewers how this part of speech functions in sentences. The PowerPoint concludes with an...

Hook your class into an exploration of and discussion about violence in video games with a cute animal clip and a video game trailer. After a quick discussion about how media can affect mood, class members read a related article and...

Language arts is made up of many parts. Learners review the parts of a sentence, as well as how to make a simple sentence into a complex sentence, before examining full paragraphs and identifying the topic, body, and concluding sentence...

A super lesson plan that integrates technology and career exploration! High schoolers use graphic organizers and brainstorming to first analyze Time Magazine covers, then they think about what they want to be doing in 10 years. They...

What would Ben do? Jumping off from the pseudonymous letters Ben Franklin fooled his older brother into publishing when he was still a teenager, young literary lovers dive into acting, writing, and addressing a local issue with wit and...

Individuals complete a pre-assessment to gauge their ability to determine the main idea and supporting details in nonfiction text. They examine a new piece of nonfiction reading by looking at the table of contents, headings, and index...

Explain a natural phenomenon in an original myth. After researching the phenomenon they have chosen, young readers use factual information to include in their myth.  They find synonyms and new phrases to create vivid images as they...

Craft your own fairy tale based on Momotaro, a Japanese story referenced in Kyoko Mori's Shuzuko's Daughter. A list of nouns guide learners in writing their own story, and predicting what might happen in the novel.

Today's discussion of The Autobiography of Malcolm X focuses on the precise words, the telling phrases, and the sensory details Haley uses to enliven his story. Writers then work to incorporate these same techniques in the draft of their...