Help your writers eliminate "dead words" (words that are overused) from their writing. This lesson includes a SMART board presentation that will guide them through identifying, eliminating, and substituting "dead words" from sample...

Students explore the components of a KWL chart as they examine the facts of a story about the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Vocabulary from additional stories is utilized to form antonyms and synonyms.

Getting ideas down on paper is often the first step when starting a project or new unit of study. Try out this straightforward brainstorming map with your class. Learners write in a topic and use the six bubbles that branch out of the...

Ever come across an unfamiliar word while reading and can't decipher its meaning? Use a worksheet and graphic organizer that tracks and helps bring meaning to unknown words as learners read a text. A worksheet and graphic organizer come...

Copy all pages to create a book of poems during a poetry study. From alliteration to cinquain to acrostic poem, your class won't run out of templates for writing poems! Each sheet serves as a template for an entire book of poems. Other...

A million things to do, a ton of homework ... hyperbole sure does help get the point across! With the novel study for Jerry Spinelli's Third Grade Angels, scholars practice writing their own exaggerated sentences. Additionally, they...

The third lesson of five in an eighth-grade poetry unit has young scholars comparing Shakespearean sonnets with Petrarchan sonnets. To begin, they examine the different structures of the two forms and their different rhyme schemes. After...

Whether you are planning on using Of Mice and Men for whole-class reading or as a selection for literature circles; whether you are new to John Steinbeck's novel, or it has long been a part of your curriculum, you...

The blank page can be a huge hurdle to overcome when writing a poem. Take that hurdle away with an interactive format that enables pupils to write elegant diamante poems. After they add the first and last words in two separate fields,...

What's your style? Writers examine wording to add formal style and objective tone to their argumentative papers. After looking at examples of sentences, learners use turn and talk to discuss which sentences have a formal style before...

The greasers and Socs, both gangs in S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, came from opposite sides of the tracks, yet seemed to live in two different worlds. Scholars answer comprehension questions, create alliterations, and work with...

As part of a therapeutic and restorative exercise, pupils use worksheets to recall experiences and explore their reactions to major feelings, from anxiety and anger to joy and love. 

Words matter! That's the big idea behind an activity that asks scholars to replace words in FDR's "Day of Infamy" speech with synonyms. They then listen to a recording of President Roosevelt's address and compare his version to their own.

Sometimes the New Order becomes synonymous with its implications for European countries, but what about its consequences for East Asia? The final instructional activity in a four-part series teaches scholars about World War II. High...

What are the most prominent symbols of the United States? Learn about the bald eagle, the American flag, and the Statue of Liberty in a reading comprehension activity that includes a short passage and five reflective questions.

Supplement a class reading of George Washington's Socks with this list of vocabulary words. Including a mixture of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, this resource asks young readers to record the page number and a synonym for...

Develop the decoding skills of your middle and high schoolers. Scholars participate in a classroom activity that requires them to decode a word with a prefix and suffix. They apply the skill of breaking the word into parts of meaning as...

Students discuss and learn synonyms. In this synonyms instructional activity, students use a thesaurus to look up synonyms for the given list of words.

People should always choose their words carefully. Scholars examine the words used by Martin Luther King, Jr. in paragraphs 10 and 11 of his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Readers answer questions about word use, think about synonyms,...

Require your class to look closely at terms by analyzing similarities and differences. The template provides space and sentence frames for writing about similarities and differences.

In this vocabulary word map worksheet, students choose a word from a social studies text and write it in the center of the page. Students define it, write an antonym, use it in a sentence, and draw a picture.

A 46-slide presentation focuses on ways to describe characters in stories, how to create story characters, and how to show a character's personality in a student-created story. The colorful and engaging slides provide lots of great ideas...

Learners discuss twin words. They examine the use of homophones and create cartoons to illustrate the homophones. Students play "Go Fish" using synonyms, antonyms, or homophones.

Fourth graders recognize spelling words with ou and ow sounds. In this spelling lesson, 4th graders begin with ground and town and build lists of words with similar spelling. Students complete a worksheet with antonyms and synonyms for...