Young writers generate descriptive words. They use pictures of various landscapes (from books, magazines, or the Internet) and complete a story pyramid. The pyramid (included here) asks to describe the main character, the setting, and...

Display knowledge about Pablo Picasso and his works with a folder book. Learners cut out images, paste them into tiny petal books, and then attach those onto folder pages. In the additional space, pupils write about the words of art.

All good stories must come to an end. Writers review teacher feedback from their Children's Book Storyboards and make plans for revision. Next, they begin writing their final drafts and putting them together with their illustrations. 

Demonstrate gift giving as an act of caring about someone versus gifts for show (or gifts from the purse). Elementary learners practice giving gifts from the heart by creating a poem for someone special to them.

Close up your unit of study with an examination of one of the guiding or essential questions as it relates to what your class has studied and other research. Class members first write down the question. Then they note down information...

Ask your class to puzzle out the meaning of various affixes. Learners read sentences and develop a new word with an affix to replace the underlined words. They write down the words and help to categorize them by affix.

Who knew determining author's purpose could be turned into a game? Four teams compete to correctly identify the author's purpose for writing a series of passages.

How do you assess whether pupils have mastered certain concepts and skills? Designing a performance task that asks learners to demonstrate their skills and providing writers with a rubric that identifies these skills and provides...

The opening exercise in this instructional unit introduces class members to the writing process they will follow to craft an informative, expository research paper that addresses their research question. To begin, writers are asked to...

An informative resource instructs pupils on how to write their essay drafts about the theme of control in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Next, scholars complete an Exit Ticket, listing their three favorite characters from the...

Focusing on the consequences of the hunter-gatherer food chain that Michael Pollan discusses in The Omnivore's Dilemma, teams work together to create hunter-gatherer food chain consequences charts. Next, scholars view other groups'...

Scholars complete an assessment, read an informational article, and answer text-based questions. Also, pupils use the Painted Essay technique to write a draft editorial about a topic they studied throughout the unit, the Mary River Mine...

Accompany a novel study of Hatchet by Gary Paulson with a unit consisting of 16 lessons focused on physical and emotional survival. Reading the story along with a variety of informational texts, scholars compare and contrast reading...

School subjects connect when your young scholars use math to edit English. Math allows you to convert an entire paragraph into a simple equation or inequality. Examples encourage learners to write expressions, equations, and inequalities...

Go beyond a traditional word search with a clue matching, word search combo. Scholars read clues, write the word that matches, then search for the word in a puzzle. Clues and words offer insight into the life of polar bears.

Feeling the pressure to confirm is something any adolescent can relate to. Explore an essential theme with a response to literature assessment that prompts learners to identify main ideas with evidence and supporting details.

Review parts of speech and revise writing for clarity with one learning exercise! Elementary grammarians change ten predicate adjectives to attributive adjectives, combining two choppy sentences into one smooth thought.

Challenge your classes to think between the curves. Given two function formed by the combination of two exponential functions, individuals must write three functions in which all values would lie between the given. The question is...

Learners prepare for the end-of-unit task by evaluating previous homework and writing sentences with parallel structure and various phrases. Scholars do this by closely examining E.B. White's Death of a Pig. They examine the structure of...

Put it in your own words. Scholars work independently on their mid-unit assessments by responding to a writing prompt. They write about Miné Okubo’s life and the moments when Okubo became visible again.

How do writers engage their readers in a story? Pupils consider the question and use the informational text, "The Hero's Journey" to justify their plan for their own fictional narrative. To that end, scholars write an explanatory...

Sharpen those pencils; it's time to write! Scholars begin writing the first body paragraph of their literary analysis essays. Additionally, pupils use graphic organizers to analyze a character's point of view from Laurence Yep's...

Not all sandwiches are edible. Scholars use a Quote Sandwich graphic organizer to draft the written content of their informative consumer guides. Additionally, they view a mini-lesson on formal writing. 

DOLPHIN—Daily Organizational Learning Portfolio and Handbook of Intelligent Note-taking. Here you'll find over 40 pages of templates, reference handouts, and instruction on ways pupils can organize their binders for a productive school...