Determining Importance

Creating story quilts is a great way to combine art, social studies and literature. Kids select a story, a published one or one of their own, to illustrate, paint on a canvas square, embellish, and mount on a felt backing.

Help learners find the most important information in a text with a lesson on summarizing. As kids read through a passage about Johannes Gutenberg, they summarize small excerpts, put events in sequential order, and respond to two longer...

You don't need to be planning a museum tour to take advantage of this graphic organizer that teaches kids how to read a work of art. The student version directs viewers' attention to the content, color, and composition, while the teacher...

Musicals have been adapted from stage plays, novels, and movies. With The Lion King, Disney transforms its animated film into show-stopping, live-action musical theatre. The guide Disney provides to accompany a study of the award-winning...

Provide these templates as aids for pupils as they work to compose summaries of both stories and informational texts. The first two frames provide sentence starters to help learners structure their summaries and include all the necessary...

The difference between an active reader and a passive reader has to do with the ways they access the same material. Review study skills and note-taking techniques with a video about active reading, which includes tips for using...

Do your young authors suffer from writer's block when they try to write short stories? Access their natural creativity with C-Gor, the writing monster! The instructional activity takes aspiring authors through a new writing process...

Read and incorporate a variety of Aesop's Fables into a fable genre study with an eBook produced by the Library of Congress. The interactive eBook contains 146 fables written by Aesop and includes colorful interactive illustrations by...

Eighth graders are introduced to performance art as a way to respond to important current-day issues in society. Pupils create their very own original art work using photography and poetry. These three lessons do a nice job of, not only...

The Jets and the Sharks are back! As you watch the film version of West Side Story, use this viewing guide to help keep your class on track and analyze important plot events. Each song's lyrics are presented here, along with a set of...