This is a short video describing what some of the aspects of the Fantasy Genre. It is engaging for upper elementary and lower middle school aged students. It touches on magic, other worlds, magic creatures, quest, good vs evil.

This lesson plan is intended to encourage learners to integrate the visual arts with science and appreciate nature. Students will create a round or square stepping stone using colored glass pieces with a mortar and sand mixture.

Written by Steve Poulter, it presents a different way of teaching writing to students. The method is “writing with the teacher present” or simply students doing ALL their writing in class. This way of teaching writing is more like athletic practice than class. Students practice writing while the coach (professor or instructor) was around to break steps down into smaller and smaller elements and to help them learn the skills “in real time.

This lesson plan is the second in the "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community" series. It provides a video of the poet Claudia Rankine reading the poem "from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman standing]" and a companion lesson with a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.

In this online book, Traci Gardner defines the process of standards-based writing assignment design and assessment with a research-based approach.

This is an example of the Genre Planning Chart you will submit for Evidence of Preparation and Planning.

This lesson plan is the fifth in the "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community" series. It provides an audio recording of the poet, Minnie Bruce Pratt, reading the poem "The Great Migration." The companion lesson contains a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.

In this English Journal article, Heller suggests that teachers’ approach to writing assignment design and response should focus more on a response cycle that prioritizes writing as a process rather than as a product. He offers suggestions for teachers to make this shift in their planning and teaching.

The lessons in this unit are designed to help your students recognize how people of different cultures and time periods have used cloth-based art forms (quilts) to pass down their traditions and history.

In this Cult of Pedagogy podcast, Jennifer Gonzalez guides teachers to consider how to better define and align assessment criteria with their identified learning goals so that assessment is used to measure student learning progress in writing.

In this Writers Who Care blog post, Ellen Foley offers strategies through a list of Do’s and Don’ts as teachers develop and implement their approaches to giving feedback to student writers. Be sure to check out all of the hyperlinks to see the research and additional resources that support the practices shared here.

Inspiration and ideas to encourage educators to expand the possibilities when it comes to any genre they teach.

Students will learn about the impact of enjambment in Gwendolyn Brooks' short but far-reaching poem "We Real Cool." One element of this lesson plan that is bound to draw students in is a compelling video of working-class Bostonian John Ulrich reciting the poem.

An English language skills textbook to help ESL students acquire communication skills in the community (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) The book is aimed at CLB levels 5/6 focusing on intercultural skills and essential skills: reading text, document use, writing, oral communication, thinking skills, working with others, and computer use.

The materials here were selected for ESOL learners who have intermediate-high intermediate writing skills and are starting more "academic" levels of course work in order to transition into college-level composition courses.

In this Cult of Pedagogy podcast, Jennifer Gonzalez defines three different approaches to designing rubrics to assess student work and provides examples of each, while discussing the benefits and drawbacks of the different models. Teachers may find these resources useful as they consider how they use their rubrics for response to and/or assessment of student writing.

Learn how to make inferences in literature, nonfiction and real life, and to support those inferences with strong, reliable evidence.

An inference is just coming to a logical conclusion from whatever evidence you have. It’s one of the most valuable thinking skills you can learn.

The ability to make inferences is one of the things that make a person what we call “smart.” And we say the person who can’t make inferences is “a little slow on the uptake,” right?, because other people figure out what’s going on more quickly than he or she does. We have to spell things out explicitly for that person.

So, when your teacher says he or she is going to help you learn how to make good inferences, imagine in your head that he or just said that you’re going to learn how to be smart today. You’re going to learn how to think, because, ultimately, that’s what making inferences is all about.

Reading Emily Dickinson's letters alongside her poems helps students to better appreciate a remarkable voice in American literature, grasp how Dickinson perceived herself and her poetry, and perhaps most relevant to their own endeavors consider the ways in which a writer constructs a "supposed person."

This lesson is about the Phoenicians, who invented the alphabet inherited by the Greeks, Romans, and eventually, us.

In this lesson, students will explore Dickinson's poem "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" both as it was published as well as how it developed through Dickinson's correspondence with her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson.