Your learners engage their five senses every day without knowing it. Help them identify their experiences and extend their understanding with a month full of lessons designed for the five senses. Kids focus on a different sense every...

Students write with a sharp, distinct focus identifying topic, task and audience. They discuss anticipatory statements with supporting details. Students create an essential question at the beginning of a composition, novel, or unit.

Have your class explore alcohol awareness public service announcements. Provided are a detailed plan and a complete set of materials for doing just this. Learners are exposed to a series of approaches and advertisements and decide which...

Determining which statements represent fact or the author's opinion in an integral part of reading informational text. Encourage seventh graders to read a passage about Barack Obama and the city of Chicago, as well as a passage focused...

First graders create a "Focus on Me" book of photographs and narrative passages about themselves. They focus on the traits that make each of them special. They become a VIP for a day in order to share the books.

Join the newspaper business with a series of lessons and exercises focused on elements of journalism. The packet focuses on distinguishing fact from opinion, writing effective headlines, sequencing events, and editing and...

Students engage in a lesson which is a straight forward, teacher centered, grammar lesson focusing on written and oral production of the target structure. After a lecture/demo, students work individually on an exercise imbedded in this...

Turn your 6th graders into detectives while growing their love of reading. Using critical thinking skills, they will be able to describe the five basic elements of detective fiction, read detective novels, make predictions, use the...

Words, words, words. The function of words in persuasive writing is the focus of a group activity that asks members to analyze how words advertisers use are designed to influence targeted audiences.

Blow your pupils' minds with information about some of the world's most awesome natural occurrences: volcanos. Class members read a short article and respond to included questions. The focus of the resource is on understanding and...

Compelling discussions are the result of open-ended, challenging questions. An introduction to Paideia discussions includes explicit directions about how to prepare readers and how to model the kinds of questions they should develop...

A little bit complicated, but a whole lot of fun. Show your class an episode of the British television game show Just a Minute. After an explanation of the rules (no repetition, hesitation, or deviation) groups develop topics, based on...

In this focus on the topic when writing worksheet, students read how to select and narrow a topic, check resources and write a thesis sentence.

What will your class do in the future? What won't they do? Practice the present continuous form for future arrangements (or future progressive tense) with several fill-in-the-blanks and sentence reordering activities. 

Students explore works of nonfiction. In this nonfiction genre focus lesson, students activate prior knowledge of nonfiction, identify the types of narrative and informative nonfiction, and analyze a word of nonfiction.

Fifth graders brainstorm a list of holidays celebrated by a majority of people in the United States. They each select an American holiday from the list as well as another country that may have a holiday that is similar. Next, they...

If you are planning on working on a research paper in your class, take a look at this resource first. Starting off with information about plagiarism, the series of activities briefly described here should give your pupils a general idea...

If you’re going to get a tattoo, make sure your artist writes it right because it’s hard to correct their inkings. That’s the big idea in this short lesson on commonly misspelled words like their/there/they’re and it’s/its.  Images...

This instructional activity will focus on the aspects of Shakespeare's comedy that become more evident in performance. By viewing clips of the same Shakespeare scene in different film versions, high schoolers have the opportunity to...

When do people ask for anonymity? Why? After reading the New York Times article "For a Reporter and a Source, Echoes of Broken Promise," young readers participate in a roundtable discussion focusing on freedom of the press and the use of...

Experience how a story can drastically change when the point of view is altered. Young scholars first read a review of Disney's film Tarzan, focusing on how the point of view in the classic story is important. They then select...

Brian Jacques’ novel Redwall provides the focus for a series of lessons involving the analysis of folklore. Adopting the persona of a character, groups write letters in the voice of their character, assemble a collage using Microsoft...

How can word choice affect a political speech? Middle and high schoolers examine the text of the 1999 State of the Union Address, and then determine how newspaper articles and television reports describe and analyze the event. Use this...

Explore how photographs can represent a whole story to a viewer. Middle schoolers work on narrative writing techniques in this lesson, focusing on photographs from the New York Times to write first-person descriptive narratives....