Indiana ELA Standard: 4.W.7

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?

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

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

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.

Can your students spot the run-on sentences?

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.