Jewels of Endurance

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...

Writing is a process, and lesson planning is, too! A personal narrative unit stresses the writing process to pupils, who first examine various stories and poems as a model of autobiographical writing and then write their own stories....

Present the class with a slide show that will give them a great head start in writing expository and narrative texts. The information is highlighted for easy note taking, well organized, and presented in a kid-friendly manner. It...

What happens next? Work on story sequence with a activity that prompts kids to put a story back in order. Additionally, they discuss what would happen if one event was missing from the sequence.

Let's pretend! Ben Bova's short story "Moonwalk" is used as a mentor text in a unit that shows kids how to create their own imaginative narratives. A great resource that deserves a special place in your curriculum library.

So much fun! After reading and summarizing each chapter of the book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, pupils will create a Photostory. The class is divided into six groups, each responsible for summarizing, story boarding, and creating a...

Elementary writers will create short stories with their classmates' help, publishing the books using computer programs. The first learner writes a sentence to start the story, and each classmate adds a sentence to the story. The original...

Readers reflect on enjoyable stories they know, brainstorm criteria that make a story "good," analyze a New York Times article about innovative children's performances, re-envision classics on their own, and peer edit drafts. Use this as...

Knock, knock, knock...Creep out your class with a critical thinking lesson focused on word relationships in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." They investigate  the relationship between word choice, mood, and interpretation of a...

Introduce your class to Edgar Allan Poe with a series of mostly self-guided tasks and assignments. Class members follow the list of tasks, starting by watching a video with background information and ending with a compare-and-contrast...