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Violence Prevention
Compare and contrast the ideologies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle schoolers conduct research regarding civil rights and rhetorical strategies used in political speechs. They examine the strategies that both men employed...
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Freak The Mighty: KWHL Instructions for Generating Student Research
Readers of Freak the Mighty employ a KWHL strategy to explore the topics of bullying and friendship prior to reading Rodman Philbrick’s story that is “like truth serum. . . whether it really happened or not.” Research could be extended...
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Close Reading
Eleventh graders read and study Hamlet. Then they are introduced to close reading as a means of understanding what is being read--not only understanding the printed word, but also the nuances and connotations of language as it is used by...
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I Can Answer That!
Enhance reader comprehension! Examine different comprehension strategies with your second, third, and fourth graders. They discuss the strategy of questioning by developing their own comprehension questions to help improve their memory...
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Shizuko’s Daughter: K-W-L
What would your class like to learn about Japanese culture? Prepare them for a novel unit about Kyoko Mori's Shizuko's Daughter with a KWL chart. After listing what they already know about Japanese culture, they write questions...
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Prewriting
As a class, 7th graders observe examples of brainstorming and then complete brainstorming worksheets themselves. They compose and describe planning strategies. Prior to writing an essay, they identify the purpose and the audience.
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Making Connections
Fourth graders investigate visual imagery to aid reading comprehension. In this reading strategies lesson, 4th graders discover how visual imagery helps in comprehending a story. Students use a reader's notebook to record connections.
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Introduce: Summarizing Narrative Text
When scholars re-tell a story, do they boil it down to important details in a logical order? Practice summarizing narratives using this think-aloud strategy, which is scripted here for your convenience. After explaining why this is an...
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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck: Before You Read the Book
"List reading strategies you have learned that will help you start (and finish) reading a class novel." "What do you like knowing about a novel before you read it?" Although labeled for Of Mice and Men, the prompts included on this...
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Mapping Out the Story
Discuss the reading comprehension strategy of summarization with your elementary schoolers! They read a chapter from their social studies textbook, Regions Near and Far, and create a map, or word web, for the chapter. They identify...
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Vocabulary Development
What is a root word? What is a prefix? Suffix? Use these questions to spark a discussion amongst your language art learners. Then, start by writing the word irresistible on the board and have teams of learners attempt to create new words...
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Journey to Topaz: Directed Reading Thinking Activity
Have you used the directed reading thinking activity in your classroom? Doubling as either a prereading strategy, or a during reading strategy, it helps readers connect the historical background of the text to the text itself. As the...
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QAR for The Color Purple
Have you heard of the QAR strategy? If your class is reading The Color Purple, provide them with this two-page worksheet to get them thinking. With the strategy, readers are introduced to four types of questions (right there, think and...
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Applying SQ3R to Texts
After a review of the SQ3R strategy, readers use the provided prompts to respond to a text. The value of this worksheet is in the additional questions that move the learner into higher levels of reasoning.
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Character Traits - Who are We?
Sixth graders examine character traits. In this character education lesson, 6th graders set goals to strengthen particular personal character traits. Students watch their instructor model the character trait journaling strategy prior to...
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Vocabulary Bingo: Fever 1793
Prior to reading Fever 1793, class members are introduced to vocabulary drawn from the text of Laurie Halse Anderson's novel with a bingo-style activity. The vocabulary list, a teacher copy with definitions, and the bingo template are...
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Night: Socratic Questioning Activity
We construct meaning through discussion, so help your readers of Elie Wiesel's work Night with a socratic questioning activity. The strategy is outlined on the first page, and the second page offers some example questions you give to...
Maine Content Literacy Project
Understanding Theme
The ninth in a fourteen-lesson series, this plan marks a sort of midpoint in a unit devoted to the study of short stories. Pupils learn about theme and work on their short story projects by adding to their blogs, checking in with the...
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Conversation Lesson: The Necessity of Grammar
Start a conversation to convey proper English grammar. In groups pupils voice their opinion, have well supported disagreements, and explain why they feel as they do. This lesson plan builds academic discussion skills and fosters a...
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Classroom demographics
Students use strategies to read and comprehend words and material. The use of technology is the backbone of this lesson plan and is essential for implementation.
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Summarizing: James and the Giant Peach
Text marking and a T-chart format to distinguish important information from trivia help elementary readers summarize effectively. Encouraging readers to construct a chapter summary from paragraph-level topic sentences is another sound...
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Reading Rainbow
Beginning readers observe and demonstrate a variety of reading expression strategies. They listen to the teacher read the book Ten Hungry Monsters both with and without expression, and discuss the difference. Then it's their turn!...
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Fishing For F's
Students discriminate initial sounds of words and categorize words based on the initial sound. They generate ideas and topics for writing and use prewriting and drafting strategies to formulate text.
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Building a Case for Clues
Here's a strategy that can be used with any narrative, whether read by the instructor or as independent reading. At the end of each chapter, learners predict, using prior knowledge as clues, what will happen in the next chapter. Readers...