Students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using lists of accurate, powerful adjectives.
Uncover the meaning and historical origins of the popular idiom “the bee’s knees” with this video from Say What?! Travel back in time and discover how people used whimsical expressions like "the bee's knees" to describe excellence during The Roaring Twenties. With this video, students will gain insight into the intriguing world of idiomatic expressions, language evolution, and the stories behind the sayings we use every day!
This resource includes teaching tips, discussion questions, vocabulary, and a "Bee's Knees Hive" activity.
How does a sleepless king deal with clock towers that simply won’t chime together in his kingdom? Find out in the timely tale Bells in the Night, the latest episode of YourClassical Storytime – with storytelling by Valerie Kahler and Michael Barone, music by Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and illustrations by EJ Thompson.
In the following three modules, students will learn how Marian uses storytelling, film, and poetry in her activism. Her stories of Black heroes round out our history books. With love and humor, she finds allies, and starts important conversations in her effort to build a “beloved community”– one that is civil, equitable, and harmonious.
Students in Grades 4-8 activate prior knowledge and research information about a historic event through fiction and nonfiction literature and exploration of relevant websites.
After reading and analyzing short examples of travel writing and discussing conventions of the genre, students write their own travel articles.
This video is a short overview of what fluency with text is, why it's important, and a few tips on how to teach it.
This is a short overview from the National Center on Improving Literacy of what phonemic awareness is, why it's important, and a few tips on how to teach it.
This video is a short overview of what phonics is, why it's important, and a few tips on how to teach it.
The Big6 is a six-stage model to help anyone solve problems or make decisions by using information. Students can use this model to guide them through the research process. This resource is a writing organizer that utilizes the Big6 model.
Reading is revamped in this lesson in which students use a multimedia approach to study the books by Seymour Simon.
Go Away, Big Green Monster! Ed Emberley's tale about a scary, multicolored monster is used to help students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills. In this lesson, students chorally read the story and then point out familiar color words or sight words that appear in the story. After finishing the story, students are introduced to four different literacy center activities that include participating in a read along, building word families with story words, playing a memory game with color words from the story, and retelling story events using sentence strips. In the sessions that follow, students create their own artwork of the big green monster and use that artwork to help them write a story. Students use both self- and peer-editing to improve their writing. Completed stories are either published on the Internet or in a class book.
Bio Cube is a useful summarizing tool that helps students identify and list key elements about a person for a biography or autobiography.
Students read biographies and explore websites of selected American authors and then role-play as the authors.
MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn. Deb Roy studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. On sabbatical from MIT Media Lab, he's working with the AI company Bluefin Labs. A quiz, thought provoking question, and links for further study are provided to create a lesson around the 20-minute video. Educators may use the platform to easily "Flip" or create their own lesson for use with their students of any age or level.
3, 2, 1... Blast off! Students learn new vocabulary by taking a virtual field trip to the moon, read-alouds, creating a picture dictionary, and completing a final writing activity.
Children will learn simple hand gestures to break words into syllables, show the beginning sound and the rest of the word as they blend and segment each word. They will practice with 5 new words per activity.
This episode focuses on phonological awareness. Reading expert Linda Farrell helps kindergartener Autumn learn to blend two parts of a syllable (onset and rime). Watch how Ms. Farrell gives Autumn explicit practice with onset and rime — a core phonological awareness skill that helps kids recognize and blend sound chunks within syllables
To prepare for literature circles featuring historical novels, students research the decades of the 1930s to the 1990s and share their information using Prezi, a web application for creating multimedia presentations.
Make the most of your students' diverse ability levels and experience with a prewriting activity in which they describe an abstract idea using blogging and photographs that they have taken.