What a scam! Middle and high schoolers pose as journalists exposing consumer fraud. In this lesson, they write an article for a magazine using data collected during previous investigations (prior lessons) to defend their findings that a...

This online resource is composed of a writing sample about teacher appreciation and a writing prompt for learners. You could use this as an in-class journal activity or you could have class members post their responses on the New...

What would you do if you got an extra day every week? Partners share some information about their routines and lives and write compositions about one another based on the information. Each partner tries to guess what the other person...

What does empathy look like? Encourage your pupils to put themselves in another person's shoes with several writing and discussion activities that relate to a featured short film. Over the course of the activity, individuals collaborate...

A creative way bring autobiographical writing to your poetry unit or back-to-school curriculum, this lesson plan guides you through a bio poem activity. Kids use the graphic organizer to describe themselves using adjectives, things...

Students write a topic sentence to a paragraph and explain that it introduces the main idea. After a whole-class demonstration, students write a complete paragraph with their topic sentence and supporting sentences. There are some...

State reports can be a lot of fun, especially when the learners get to choose the state they study. This research and writing-focused social studies instructional activity engages learners in collecting information, essay structure,...

Analyze various excerpts from Hamlet and read articles to develop an argument about his sanity. Middle and high schoolers write an argument essay defending whether or not they believe Hamlet is insane. You could modify this assignment...

From British accents to Texan drawls, a character's dialect can be an important part of the reading experience. A Six-Trait writing activity guides learners through the analysis of a character's dialect (Daniel Keyes's Flowers for...

Demonstrate how to engage in a polite and professional conversation with this banking and interfacing lesson. Focusing on explanatory and informaitonal texts, middle schoolers write sentences using banking and finance terminologies....

Focus on writing argument essays with your high schoolers. The lesson suggested here focuses on The Jungle, by Sinclair Lewis; however, the idea could be adapted for other texts. Check out the quick quiz provided at the end of the...

Is your opinion significant? Help your class discover the influence their opinions hold and encourage them to make a positive change in their community. To start, they get in teams and brainstorm why their school should have more healthy...

Get your class thinking about advertising with this lesson plan. Over the course of 15 days, your class will discuss advertising techniques, study the concepts of pathos, logos, and ethos, and analyze the persuasive techniques of...

Students complete a simulated book order form for their class. For this book club lesson, students budget and plan an order form for their fellow students, discussing why they chose specific books.

What would happen if you woke up one day and had become a housefly? What kinds of things would you do? Use the facts at the top of a worksheet to write a paragraph or short story about being a housefly.

Students research the English Renaissance era. In this research instructional activity, students complete this activity before reading the story The Prince and the Pauper to learn about the history. They pick topics and work in...

Help your students to vary their sentence structure with this presenation, which teaches them to use relative pronouns and adjective clauses to change the order of their sentences. The presentation details different ways to write the...

Start kids thinking about point of view and autobiographies by telling them a short story about your morning (first person), and then asking a volunteer to re-tell the story to you (second person). There are tips to help you tie this...

Encourage more pun-derstanding of word play in your literary scholars as they explore Brian P. Cleary's book Rhyme and Punishment: Adventures in Wordplay. Although this isn't suggested, consider beginning this study by simply showing...

Students read books about dinosaurs for book club groups and then participate in focused writing. In this reading and writing activity, students work together over the course of three days to produce a group story about a dinosaur.

Students discuss the importance of using adjectives in writing. They separate into five groups, each group is given a bag with an object inside to describe using just one sense. They write a description of a Hershey's Kiss using adjectives.

Students use the descriptive writing process through the use of landscape scenes, the Paragraph Writing Strategy from the University of Kansas Institute for Research in Learning, and the 4MAT Instructional Model.

Students are walked through an outline (Power Writing) and shown how to elaborate on a main idea in their writing.

Students access the internet for current news articles; increase awareness of issues in world news; to read critically; and to write critical reactions.