When you’re teaching a reading skill, can you replace some of those dull sample texts with glorious artwork?
Content Area: Language Arts
Making Punctuation Interesting
How can we move a punctuation lesson beyond mere memorization and towards interesting thinking?
A Classic: “Who’s On First” and 21st Century Kids
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.
Remix the Song “Help!”
Students took the classic song, Help!, and rewrote it to be about their collective summers.
What could we do with this Wax Museum event?
How one might revamp a “Wax Museum” project into something that focuses more on thinking than product.
Adding Complexity to Parts of Speech
Here’s how you can add some spice to an otherwise dull study of parts of speech.
Words Within Words
So… how many words can you find that are made from the letters in the world “soldier”? There’s more than 10… more than 20… more than 50…
Rewriting a Sentence With Different Coordinating Conjunctions
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”?
Synonym Graphs
Use a two-dimensional scatter plot to dig into the nuances of several synonyms.
Creating Seemingly Unrelated Analogies
Want to encourage students to find unexpected connections across content? Here’s a quick framework based on the most important terms from both bits of content.