Indiana ELA Standard: 1.W.8

How many words can you find within Patrick?

How many words can you find within ORNAMENT?

How many words are hiding inside STUFFING? More than you think.

Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!

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

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

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

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

Can your students help The Bard? We’ll fix five Shakespearean run-ons in three different ways.

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

Students use 12 random phrases to create a story that takes place in at a magical school.

In a sentence, punctuation may seem meek when compared to those mighty words, but punctuation has incredible power over the meaning of a sentence. Students will try re-punctuating sentences to find new meanings – without changing a single word!

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.

When students learn about alliteration, it’s hard to steer them away from goofy tongue-twisters. Certainly, there must be more powerful and practical ways of using alliteration. In this lesson, I draw on delicious examples from Shakespeare to show how a very advanced writer used alliteration. Then, I break those ideas down so students can try them out.

Let’s spice up a typically dull lesson about the difference between “its” and “it’s” by asking students to write a children’s story about the adventures of a critter named It.