In this lesson, Ralph Fletcher's writing style is introduced to student writers. Students will write a rough draft about a time they ate, or a time when they saw someone else eat, something unusual. Then students will read and analyze...

After giving young scholars the writing topic "A Special Day that I Remember, give students ten to fifteen minutes to write on the topic. Then tell them they will be revising their "Special Day" prompt writing, but first they will listen...

After students are given time to think about the topic -"Alone Time with an Adult I Care about," they are given ten to fifteen minutes to write between five and ten sentences on the topic. They ten are told they will revise their...

This instructional activity, inspired by the novel Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes is a fabulous classroom mentor text that helps teach a very powerful revision strategy: rewriting an idea in a completely different genre. Grimes' book...

Students learn about personification and how to use it to when writing about abstract nouns. Finally, students write poems using the nouns they have chosen and personifications they have developed. Teacher and student instructions are...

After reading excerpts in which Buck solves a problem in Jack London's The Call of the Wild, students write their own three-paragraph animal stories imitating London's style and word choice. Teacher and student instructions are provided...

Inspired by Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi & Ron Barrett, students will brainstorm adjectives that center around food that might fall from the sky. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods will be brainstormed. They will then...

After reading Anne Whitford Paul's book Everything to Spend the Night from A-Z, young scholars write about a real or imaginary sleepover and what things they should take to make it a wonderful night.

This is a good first-time programming project. You'll learn how to use JavaScript to create a basic calculator program that you can run in your Web browser.

This is a challenging first-time programming project. You'll learn how to use JavaScript to create a simple program to analyze one or more paragraphs of text. Your program will count sentences, words and letters, and report the resulting...

This writing assignments asks students to assume the voice of a character from a novel they are reading. Focusing on a topic or belief the character shows passion about in the novel, the students write an essay modeled after NPR's "This...

This lesson is based on two narrative picture books that can be compared and contrasted: When I was Five by Arthur Howard and Jamie Lee Curtis' When I Was Little: A Four-Year-Old's Memoir of her Youth. Students will need to think about...

Both Mahatmas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were influenced by Henry David Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience." Have learners research and read, using the Internet, the first part of Thoreau's essay. Then have students write an...

This memoir-style book was created by a 5th/6th grade student in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, and tells the life story of a Holocaust survivor. Blanca Rosenberg is the biography of Blanca written in first person narrative, as told to the...

Third grade students at World of Inquiry, School #58 created this set of cards as part of an expedition on natural disasters. To create their card, each student researched and wrote a descriptive summary on a specific natural event; each...

This guide to the animals at the Forest Park Zoo was created by 1st grade students at the Alice B. Beal Magnet School in Springfield, Massachusetts, and was part of a Learning expedition on animals. Students, through fieldwork...