Students participate in learning clubs, select content area topics, and draw on texts - including websites, printed material, video, and music - to investigate their topics, and share their learning using similar media.

Modeled on the activities in "Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster," a picture book, students combine vocabulary exploration with word play by planning their own vocabulary parade.

Students learn about organic gardening by developing their own research questions, conducting research, gardening at their school, creating signs about their plants, and presenting their research to the class.

Using their prior knowledge of books containing letters, students show their understanding of genre by rewriting a story and reflecting on how traditional stories differs from stories told in letters.

This lesson invites students to create a "Driver's License" for characters that have made a contribution to western expansion in the United States.

After students have read a book about the Holocaust, such as "The Diary of Anne Frank" or "Night" by Elie Wiesel, students will view "Life is Beautiful" and complete discussion questions to challenge their ability to analyze literature using film.

Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.

Movie music and magic set the scene for this lesson in which students analyze a scene from Good Morning, Vietnam and then create a scene of their own.

After reading a work of literature as a class, students will brainstorm "crimes" committed by characters from that text. Groups of students will work together to act as the prosecution or defense for the selected characters, while also acting as the jury for other groups. Students will use several sources to research for their case, including the novel and internet resources. All the while, students will be writing a persuasive piece to complement their trial work.

While this lesson uses Shakespeare's The Tempest, there are several other text options. Handouts (except for the model case handout) are generic so that they can be used with any text.

This lesson leads students to reflect on and respond to literature by creating an online scrapbook. Students view a sample electronic scrapbook and use the project rubric to evaluate it, becoming familiar with the project requirements in the process. They use an online tool to evaluate resources on a topic related to a piece of literature and post their evaluations for class reference. Students then use online resources to capture "scraps" of information about their assigned topic and create a scrapbook using PowerPoint or another presentation software, making sure to cite all their sources. They share their online scrapbook with the class, defending their choice of scrapbook entries: why is the entry important to the understanding of the topic?

This lesson focuses on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, but any piece of literature could be used for the basis of an online scrapbook.

Capture students enthusiasm for film and transfer it to reading and literature by substituting film production roles for the traditional literature circle roles.

Students practice different ways of collaborating to read a work of literature. They work in different roles as they compose and answer questions, discover new vocabulary, and examine literary elements.

Students use text sets to research a topic inspired by a fiction book they have read. A text set is a collection of multiple text genres with a single focus.

In this minilesson, students practice identifying and purposefully using vocabulary in persuasive writing that is intended to have an emotional impact on the reader.

This lesson uses "Ben's Dream" by Chris Van Allsburg to highlight ten major landmarks of the world. Students research the landmarks and present their findings to the class.

Using the character of Edward Cullen from the Twilight series, this lesson introduces the Byronic hero and asks students to compare the Byronic hero to the traditional hero and villain.

This lesson pairs the reading of historical fiction with nonfiction to introduce students to the large themes of history.

Students explore the theme of love of war through texts on camaraderie among soldiers. They then compose a visual collage depicting their beliefs about the relationship between love and war.

Paper and pixels get compared in this lesson in which students compare both printed and online versions of a magazine.

Children write and receive postcards from friends and family, and then chart where all those postcards come from on a classroom map.