Language Arts

Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.

Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.

We’ll take two seemingly unrelated pieces of content (say volcanoes and the human body) and then build analogies to connect the two ideas. In the end, students can create a skit, comic, or story relating the two concepts.

We tell students to ‘show, not tell’ — but that advice is useless until they experience the difference. This lesson makes it click.

‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.

A passage from The Velveteen Rabbit to use as a mentor text, discussion starter, or writing prompt.

Five sets of idioms related to birds (and bugs).

What item’s in a character’s bedroom would reflect their deepest desires? And what if they toured a similar character’s room?

In this lesson, students will not just fix passive sentences, but break active sentences as they learn to put the star of the sentence first.

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

How many words can you find within Patrick?

Did you ever notice that the structure of an essay is very similar to the structure of a paragraph? Hmm…

How many words can you find within “cranberry”?

Plural nouns in English are deliciously fascinating. Yet most plural lessons are so dull! In this experience, students are given a pile of plurals and then inductively create groups and pull out rules and patterns.

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

Can your students match multiple meanings of the same five words?

How many words can you find within NUTCRACKER?

Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about earthquakes back into the correct order?

How many different ways can we use the word “limit”? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!

Can your students fit a whole story into seventeen syllables? In a haiku, every word has to fight for its spot.

How many words can you find within TROMBONE?

Can your students shrink a whole story down to one sentence? Every cut reveals what is truly essential.

What on earth is a Hydromagnaphone? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.

Create a pixelated icon that represents the essence of a character!

Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?

Get better at giving presentations by studying the greats!

Let’s write the cleverest Mother’s Day cards you’ve ever seen!

How many words can you find within February?

Repeating words can be what you want, if what you want is an interesting effect. (Psst, that’s an example of anadiplosis!)

A passage from Moby Dick to use as a mentor text, discussion starter, or writing prompt.

What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?

Students pick from 12 random phrases to create a story about an incident in a restaurant.

Get your students writing some pretty darn impressive poetry based on Japan’s most famous artist.

Can your students match multiple meanings of the same five words?

A plot puzzle that works with any story you are already teaching: which events could trade places?

Context clues lessons can be a disaster. Here, we expose students to a delightful classic packed with nonsense words (“Jabberwocky”) and ask them to decipher the meanings and parts of speech. Then, it’s only natural for students to write their own nonsense poems.

Have you ever noticed that some stories have awfully similar problems? What if we looked for the most unusual way of solving a repeating problem?

A passage from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to use as a mentor text, discussion starter, or writing prompt.

Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about rain clouds back into the correct order?

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Every great author sounds like no one else. Students learn to hear an author’s voice with Charles Dickens’s dramatic A Christmas Carol, then borrow Jack London’s rugged voice, turning a flat, boring passage into writing that sounds just like him. It is reading like a writer, and it is the kind of thinking your strongest readers are hungry for.

The word “may” can be used for possibility or permission. It’s a modal auxiliary verb!