Students respond to a book they have read by thinking symbolically to create a business card for one of the characters.
In this alternative to the traditional book report, students respond to a play they have read by creating a resume for one of its characters.
Students must think critically to create comic strips highlighting six important scenes from a book they have read.
Students explore familiar literary characters, usually first encountered as adults, but whose childhood stories are only told later. Students then create childhoods for adult characters from books of their choice.
In this alternative to the traditional book report, students report on their novel choices using Facebook-like pages.
Students select a book to read based only on its cover art. After reading the book, they use an interactive tool to create a new cover for it.
Students make bookmarks on computers and share their ideas with other readers at their school, while practicing summarizing, recognizing symbols, and writing reviews-all for an authentic audience.
Students work in groups to create annotated book reviews with links to topics of interest related to their book.
Students become novice lexicographers as they explore recent new entries to the dictionary, learn the process of writing entries for the Oxford English Dictionary, and write a new entry themselves.
Through a series of picture book read-alouds, students engage in critical discussion of complex issues of race, class, and gender.
Though teachers usually caution students against using sentence fragments, Edgar Schuster's work demonstrates that professional writers often use fragments effectively. This lesson helps students understand that there are reasons that they can and should use sentence fragments to become effective writers.
As a culminating activity for "Slaughterhouse-Five", students make a compilation album (a CD with 6-8 tracks) that reflects their analysis, understanding, and reaction to the ideas in the novel "Slaughterhouse-Five".
Students create brochures on the same topic as another piece of writing they have done, highlighting how shifting purposes and audiences creates changes in their strategies as writers.
What do your students think about each other? Find out as you teach them the concepts of acrostic poems and challenge them to write an uplifting acrostic about a classmate.
Students learn components of think-alouds and type-of-text interactions through teacher modeling. In the process, students develop the ability to use think-alouds to aid in reading comprehension tasks.
Students research the effects of the Vietnam war on a specific group of people who were involved. They then create Internet scavenger hunts to share with the class.
Students choose unfamiliar words from their reading and create a multigenre, multimodal glossary of terms.
Students will learn to mind their ps and qs in this lesson on etiquette and appropriate behavior in the classroom.
The CD/DVD Cover Creator allows users to type and illustrate CD and DVD covers and related booklets for liner notes and other information. Students can use the tool to create covers for books, music, and films that they explored as well as to create covers for media they compose individually or as a class.
Students explore a range of resources on fair use and copyright then design their own audio public service announcements & PSA to be broadcast over the school's public address system.