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Seven Ways to Instill a Love for Libraries
Show your classes the knowledge, resources, and fun a library has to offer!
Student Achievement Partners
"The Glorious Whitewasher" from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain with Mini-Assessment
It's the classic scene: Tom Sawyer is whitewashing a fence. Expose your learners to Mark Twain's humor while reinforcing reading comprehension. Eighth graders are encouraged to read and reread, achieving as much exposure to the text as...
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Explore Brothers and Sisters throughout Literature
Celebrate Brothers and Sisters Day on May 2, 2013 by studying sibling pairs in literature.
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Best Websites for English Teachers
Bookmark these grammar, writing, and literature websites to build your teaching arsenal, making life just a little bit easier.
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Lesson: Michael Blum: National Identity at a Distance
Immigration, refugees, and cultural change due to the movement of people around the globe is discussed. Learners examine the work of Michael Blum to gain an understanding of how national and cultural identities shift due to immigration....
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Lesson: Mixing Metaphors across Current Events and Literature
Expression, current events, and art can go hand-in-hand. After analyzing a multi-media piece entitled, Trade Canoe for Don Quixote, the class explores their own expressive process. They create collages that show a current event or issue...
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Using Words as a Way into Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief
Use the Visual Thesaurus to predict the subject matter of Rick Riordan's book The Lightning Thief. A pre-reading activity encourages middle schoolers to use context clues and word meaning to discover what the book is about. After they...
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Amelia Earhart
Your class can learn about Amelia Earhart and practice important comprehension skills here. Learners answer questions about cause and effect, compare texts, and discuss similes and metaphors after reading Amelia Earhart: Free in the...
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The Tell-Tale Hearts of Writers
Knock, knock, knock...Creep out your class with a critical thinking lesson focused on word relationships in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." They investigate the relationship between word choice, mood, and interpretation of a...
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Shakespeare and Poe Teach Six-Trait Writing
A Six-Trait Writing instructional activity helps your middle schoolers liven up their word choice and shows them how to evaluate their own writing. Class members take a close look at the language used in poems by Shakespeare, Kipling,...
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Printing and Publishing
Explore African literature and artwork in a multicultural literacy and art lesson. Begin with a read aloud of Tiger and the Big Wind: A Tale from Africa, and afterward, have kids retell the main events in the story. They identify and...
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Character Traits in Fables
Combining art, music, dance, and reading comprehension, this lesson is geared to reach all ability levels. After reading a variety of fables and discussing story elements and character traits, class members select a moral to use as the...
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A Weave of Woods
Focus on vocabulary, comprehension, and analysis while reading A Weave of Woods, a colorful picture book by Robert D. San Souci. Young learners use worksheets to preview, predict, practice paraphrasing, and make comparisons. The richly...
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Twisted Tales
Experience how a story can drastically change when the point of view is altered. Young scholars first read a review of Disney's film Tarzan, focusing on how the point of view in the classic story is important. They then select another...
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Waking Dreams: A Teacher's Guide
A teacher's guide for a seminar held at the Cincinnati Art Museum includes a full description of several Pre-Raphaelite art pieces, artists, and connecting literary works. Excerpts from authors and poets can help you make the connection...
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What Makes a Novel a Novel?
As your authors prepare to write a hypothetical novel, they need all the inspiration they can find! Using a book they have already read (and enjoyed), learners complete a literary analysis by filling in eight short-answer questions....
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Introduce: Comprehension Monitoring using About Trees
As scholars begin reading more difficult text, they need to acquire an arsenal of comprehension strategies. Here are few helpful ones to guide new readers through the informational text About Trees, which is linked here for printing....
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The First Strawberries
Young scholars explore Cherokee legends. They read The First Strawberries by Joseph Bruchac, and then do several activities to help comprehension. They discuss the book and answer comprehension questions. In addition, they retell the...
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The Jacket: Journal Templates Teacher's Guide
Explore this story involving prejudice and racism to enhance learners' comprehension skills. The story The Jacket by Andrew Clements involves an African American boy who is falsely accused of stealing someone's jacket. This teacher's...
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Experience and Perspective
Sixth graders make connections between past experiences and perspective. They read Keeping the Night Watch by Hope Anita Smith. Then, they analyze a character's history and state the past experiences that form their perspective. In the...
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Read-Alouds for the Holidays and Winter
These five titles will inspire creativity, research, and reflection in your classroom.
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Creating Supporting Characters
Supporting characters need detail and characteristics just like a main character. Keep your budding authors entrenched in detail as they write their novels. This lesson focuses on developing supporting characters using personal...
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It's Your Opinion
Everyone has a different opinion about the characters they read about in books. Have your class explore forming an opinion and finding evidence to support it as they read and discuss what they think about a particular character. They...
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Determining Author's Point of View: The Sneeches
Determine the author's point of view in a text. Young readers read Dr. Seuss' The Sneeches and identify the author's purpose in the story. They identify persuasive techniques in writing, asking and answering questions to better...