Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" serves as an exemplar for a mini-lesson on semicolons. Working alone or in small groups, class members first circle all the semicolons in the letter, and then consider how this...

Powerful verbs. Significant nouns. Great adjectives. Readers of The Last Lecture conduct a power vocabulary search and create a list of words drawn from the text that will be used to craft a found poem.