What do we do with advanced students who need something more in language arts? Here are bunches of articles about how to differentiate vocabulary, word studies, spelling, and reading.
To start differentiating in Language Arts, it's often as simple as upgrading your examples. Bring in authentically interesting novels, paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and words.
When you read a book with students, avoid getting bogged down with the nitty-gritty. Just pick one big idea and have fun reading! No quizzes, no memorizing, no essays. Just develop your students’ love of reading.
Here’s the perfect constraint for March! Writing with the digits of Pi.
Instead of just memorizing what a bunch of morphemes mean, we’re looking broadly, exploring patterns, finding unexpected similarities and weird differences.
Here’s an interesting way to move students past mundane patterns in their writing. Ask for a rewrite, but without a letter (or two).
How can we move a punctuation lesson beyond mere memorization and towards interesting thinking?
My 21st century 12-year-olds absolutely died watching Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s On First” skit. And we got a great homophone activity out of it too.
Here’s how you can add some spice to an otherwise dull study of parts of speech.
No reader has ever said, “I love reading because my parents made me read challenging books” or “Once my teacher made me read at Lexile 980, I discovered how wonderful reading is!”
The first unit in our writing program was always teaching the coordinating conjunctions. It always felt goofy teaching this to 6th graders – especially a gifted magnet class. I mean… do they really not know the difference between “and” and “but”?
Sixteen unlikely heirs? A mysterious murder? A fortune on the line? Let’s dig into The Westing Game!
Use a two-dimensional scatter plot to dig into the nuances of several synonyms.
One mark of an advanced writer is their use of figurative language. An on-level writer might use figurative language correctly but will rely heavily on clichés. An advanced writer will surprise us with interesting, often more nuanced use of figurative language. And nowhere is this more apparent than with alliteration.
How do we differentiate a dull lesson like “its” vs “it’s”? I decided to push it to an extreme (and include some unexpected novelty).
Take your students through Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol this holiday season and expose them to a classic while exploring the Universal Theme of Change. And, hey, since this story’s in the public domain, you can print out a PDF or link to the text at Project Gutenburg. A Christmas Carol Summary Dickens has organized […]
Here’s how I’d wrap a big idea around our study of “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler”. We’d investigate the paradox that people want to both fit in and be unique! A quote from the author, E. L. Konigsburg, will be our entry point.
Roald Dahl’s Matilda, a childhood favorite of mine, opens up some fantastic discussions about adults, being brave, and how power can be used and abused.
Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 science-fiction classic, A Wrinkle in Time makes for a fantastic classroom novel study.
A fun, abstract vocab puzzle in which students can add one letter per line, forming a pyramid of words.
Long ago, I created a lesson to help my students understand character archetypes. As I’ve revised this lesson, I’ve tried to balance the male/female ratio. For some archetypes, it’s pretty hard and I’d love your help!
A reader was looking for examples of high-quality books for gifted/talented 4th and 5th graders, but she was constrained to a lexile range of 900-1000. Here are the recs I received…
Once students have a topic they’d like to research, how do we help them form more interesting questions?
We’re going to take the Academic Valentine idea from earlier, and extend it into a full blown love letter – just in time for Valentine’s Day!
Begin with a small, simple word and identify its antonym. Then, take this second word and find its antonym. Many times, you’ll find that an antonym of an antonym isn’t always related the original word.
Palindromes are one of those fun ideas that some gifted kids just latch onto. We’ll check out palindromic words, phrases, and even numbers in this article.
Many students blow past grade-level spelling and vocabulary at a young age. Unfortunately, a common technique to “challenge” them is to find harder and more obscure words for their spelling list. Instead, let’s take advantage of the built-in complexity of common words with multiple-meanings.