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Animating Poetry: Reading Poems about the Natural World
EDSITEment
In this EDSITEment lesson, which is centered on poems about the natural world, students are encouraged to make the reading of poetry a creative act, and to appreciate familiar literary devices in their functions as semaphores or interpretive signals. Several pieces of literature appropriate for use with this lesson are suggested.
Grade: 6 | 7 | 8
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Degrees of Change: Conservation in My Community
Xpeditions
This "Six Degrees" activity introduces students to the concepts of climate change. They can learn the causes and consequences of global warming, and discuss how climate affects daily life in their areas. The lesson includes an activity where students can learn about global warming and their community's conservation efforts. Students develop and complete a project documenting, via reporting or photography, a local conservation effort.
Grade: 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
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Degrees of Change: Conservation in My Community Photographer's Workbook
Xpeditions
This "Six Degrees" handout supplements the Photographer's Project activity. It can help students to organize their photography projects, take better pictures, and structure presentations and layouts.
Grade: 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
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Make a Splash! Using Dramatic Experience to "Explode the Moment"
ReadWriteThink
Engage your students in using descriptive language. After hearing vivid sensory language from popular literature and participating in a staged dramatic experience, students are encouraged in this lesson from ReadWriteThink to use a graphic organizer to detail what they saw, felt, thought, did, said, and heard during the memorable moment and to elaborate or "explode" the details using descriptive writing.
Grade: 3 | 4 | 5
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Marketplace: Price Increase or Price-Gouging?
EconEdLink
Students learn about price-gouging. Using a hypothetical post-disaster example, they will learn more about supply and demand, as well as the complexities associated with price increases in a supply-constrained market
Grade: 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
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Marketplace: School Competition
EconEdLink
In June 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that Cleveland's system of giving students vouchers to attend private or religious schools did not violate the constitutional separation of church and state. In this lesson, students listen to an audio file about school vouchers creating market competition for public schools in June 2002. Students will identify the story's major concepts and their supporting details using an interactive note-taker.
Grade: 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
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Modeling Academic Writing Through Scholarly Article Presentation
ReadWriteThink
In this lesson from ReadWriteThink, students use an online database to access an appropriate article of literary criticism connected to a work of literature they have already read as a class assignment. Students then prepare the article for presentation by highlighting key elements of its structure and content and present the article to their peers.
Grade: 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
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Reporter's Workbook
Xpeditions
This "Six Degrees" handout supplements the Reporter's Project activity. It can help students with building good interview questions. The handout can help students organize their ideas and structure their report.
Grade: 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
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Semicolons and Swift: Analyzing Punctuation and Meaning
ReadWriteThink
Encourage students to learn about punctuation and its influence on meaning. In this ReadWriteThink lesson, students identify and categorize different ways Jonathan Swift and those who have edited his text since its initial publication used semicolons in the essay, "A Modest Proposal." They compare these uses with rules for semicolon use as indicated in online guides, theorizing about uses that do not follow the rules. Following this analysis and theorizing, students use what they learn about punctuation and its influence on meaning to write insightfully about their findings, using semicolons as they do so.
Grade: 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
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Thoughtshots Can Bring Your Characters to Life!
ReadWriteThink
Engage students to add detail to their stories in the form of "thoughtshots": flashbacks, flash-aheads, and internal dialogue. This lesson from ReadWriteThink has students identify and discuss thoughtshots in "The Old Woman Who Named Things" by Cynthia Rylant. The teacher models how to insert thoughtshots into a text, using "An Angel for Solomon Singer" (also by Rylant). Students then write their own thoughtshots to add to their writing.
Grade: 3 | 4 | 5
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William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream: Conflict Resolution and Happy Endings
EDSITEment
In this EDSITEment lesson, students focus on the characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream, in order to describe and analyze their conflicts, and then to watch how those conflicts get resolved.
Grade: 6 | 7 | 8
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