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The apostrophe has two important jobs: it shows possession or ownership, and it stands in for letters that have been removed from words when a contraction is made. It's important to know how to use the apostrophe correctly. People make mistakes all the time! This classroom resource will teach students when to use an apostrophe. This resource offers informational material, quizzes, videos, and games about the use of apostrophes.

A relative adverb is a word that talks about a place, time, or reason for something. Remember the three "w's": where, when, and why.

This resource allows students to practice identifying relative adverbs.

A picture book, The Coal Thief by Alane Adams, is read aloud by Christian Slater on The SAG-AFTRA Foundation's Daytime Emmy-nominated and award-winning children's literacy website, Storyline Online. This video provides an opportunity for students to establish a purpose before reading a literary text to enhance comprehension.  The teacher may instruct students to be listening for a central problem and solution, place and time period (setting), character development, or other literary elements in the text as they listen to the read-aloud.

After exploring a variety of circle plot storybooks, students identify, explore, and apply the elements of circle plot structures to their own stories. "Reading like writers," students will explore the ways that stories are structured; then, "writing like writers," students explore organizational structures in their own writing. Students first examine the attributes of circular shapes and brainstorm things with a circular pattern, such as seasons. After exploring how Cynthia Rylant's Long Night Moon might be a circular story, students listen to a circle story read aloud. Students discuss why the story is called a circular story and make connections to Rylant's book. They then read several more examples and, using circle plot diagrams as their tools, students write their own circular plot stories. Finally, students share their work with peers, revise their work using a checklist for self-evaluation, and compare their self-evaluation to teacher assessment.

Students will analyze shapes, lines, and color in art.  They will write a story with an introduction, climax, and conclusion to describe the painting.  Students will share their stories with the class.  Assessment rubric, letter to parents, examples of artwork, and lesson plan included in PDF.   

This video is designed for parents and learners to sit down and watch together. As you watch this updated version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, take note of the character's personalities, how these characters interact, and how they are similar or different from one another.

After the video, check out the additional activities below for the classroom and for the home, and watch the “Guided Viewing” version for parents to get additional tips for helping their child understand the English Language Arts concepts in the video.

Designed to meet Grade 5 English Language Arts Standards: Reading Literature: Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact).

You can access the text by using the following link: https://aptv.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/shortstory_grade5/fairy_tales/

Bam! Beep! Zoom! Students are sure to delight in the study of onomatopoetic words through the use of comic strips. In this lesson, students begin with an introduction to onomatopoeia, which describes words that imitate the natural sound associated with an action or object. As a class, students view several comic strips and are guided in identifying examples of onomatopoeia. The group then discusses the purpose of onomatopoeia and its effect in a story before students work individually to find examples of onomatopoeia in other comics. Finally, students work individually or in pairs to create their own comic books that include onomatopoeic language. After presenting their comics to the class, students discuss the use of onomatopoeia and its effectiveness in each comic strip.

Students will identify the elements of a story - character, setting, plot.  They will listen to a story while listening to "Aquarium" from Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns.  They will identify story elements.  They will listen to "Fossils" from Carnival of the Animals and create a story including character, setting, and plot.  

This lesson explores overusing simple sentences. Simple sentences can be dull and boring. Make use of compound or complex sentences! This resource includes an activity sheet that allows students to practice varying sentence structures. 

Huck Finn's moral journey parallels Mark Twain's questions about slavery.  Like the photographers of the nineteenth-century, Twain, a Realist, struggled with how best to portray fictionalized characters, while still expressing truth and creating social commentary.  In this lesson, students use a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast Mark Twain's novel and excerpts from Frederick Douglass' narrative to original photographs of slaves from the late-nineteenth century.  Then they write an essay to compare the different portrayals, arguing to what extent art can reliably reflect truth.  In addition, they will discuss art as social commentary.

Humans thrive and survive within a narrow range of air pressures. When air pressures are out of this range, we have more physical problems. What happens when humans go into space? How have engineers made it possible to survive when air pressure approaches zero?

This informational material will relate the precalculus concept of limits of functions using a real-world issue--engineering astronaut spacesuits. There are embedded videos within the text. 

Students begin by brainstorming types of poetry, then examining themed poetry collections to find examples. They create a working definition of poetry that they will revisit throughout the unit. Next students reexamine the collections, identifying what the poems have in common and generating a list of characteristics of thematic poetry collections. Students then begin work on their own poetry collection. In each session, they read, analyze, and write a different form of poetry, including diamante, cinquain, 5W, Bio, I Am, Name, Acrostic, Limerick, and Two-Voice poems. For some forms, they write about themselves and for others, they interview and write about a classmate, but all the poems follow the theme of "getting to know each other". Throughout the process, students complete a checklist to organize and track what they learn about poetry forms and elements of poetry. Graphic organizers are included for each poetic form.

This informational material explains how to conduct choral reading in the classroom. Choral reading is reading aloud in unison with a whole class or group of students. Choral reading helps build students' fluency, self-confidence, and motivation. Because students are reading aloud together, students who may ordinarily feel self-conscious or nervous about reading aloud have built-in support.

These short, accessible, image-driven prompts invite students to pen short stories, poems, and memoirs; share experiences from their lives; analyze illustrations, graphs, and charts; and tell us their opinions on hot-button issues. This list from The York Times provides all the prompts that were published during the 2021-22 school year.

There are multiple categories of prompts that can be used for students to practice various modes of writing including:

What story does this image inspire for you?

Share experiences from your own life.

What do you think this image, chart or cartoon is saying?

What’s your opinion on this issue?

These prompts are intended to be used as skill practice after students have been taught the structure and mechanics of narrative, explanatory, and argumentation writing. The teacher should preview the prompts to ensure they are appropriate for the intended grade level. 

The Northern Arapaho of the Wind River Indian Reservation are storytellers. In an effort to pass their culture to the next generation, the elders tell the children four traditional stories. Using clay animation, shadow puppets, painting, drawing, and performance, the children make the stories come to life.

LESSON OBJECTIVES:

Students will investigate how traditional teaching and the passing on of knowledge and wisdom are done through storytelling.

This is a reading guide/lesson plan with step-by-step instructions to accompany the book Feivel's Flying Horses by Heidi Smith Hyde and illustrated by Johanna Van Der Sterre. Feivel's Flying Horses tells the story of a Jewish woodcarver who moved from the Old Country and carved carousel horses to earn money to bring his family from Europe to America. The story is a historical fiction story of immigrants coming to America. The reading guide is recommended for kindergarten through 4th grade.  

In this lesson, students identify how the rapper, Common, and writer, Walter Dean Myers, reinterprets Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of nonviolence in their own works. This lesson also aims to expose high school students to nonviolent options of conflict-resolution. To activate prior knowledge, students will watch Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech and read Doreen Rappaport's picture book, Martin's Big Words, and recall how he approached conflict. The students will connect Dr. King's answer to conflict-resolution with Common's interpretation of nonviolence, as demonstrated in his song, “A Dream”. The students will also connect this dream of nonviolence to Walter Dean Myers' short story, “Monkeyman,” from the book 145th Street. Students are assigned a particular homework task prior to reading the short story in order to encourage a text-based discussion on characterization and conflict. The students will be introduced to Dr. King's Six Principles of Nonviolence and compose a thesis essay as a final assessment.

ABC Slider Puzzle is a new twist on putting the letters of the alphabet in alphabetical order! Start with "A" in the top left corner, then slide the letter blocks up, down, left, or right to put them in alphabetical order. This game is fun for all ages: young learners will have fun practicing their ABCs, and older kids will have a blast solving the puzzle!

In this resource, students connect new information to personal experiences which helps learners comprehend and clarify their responses to literature. Learners can apply and accommodate vocabulary and meanings they already understand to new situations and concepts. Students make connections between a video about bees and their own personal experiences through a poem written for two voices.
Students share personal experiences they have had with bees. They then watch a video clip about handling bee hives and wearing a beard of bees. They respond to the video by connecting their response to personal experiences through a poem for two voices.