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In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus explains to Scout that "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it" (36). Make this advice more literal by inviting students to imagine spending a day in someone else's shoes in this writing activity. Students examine a variety of shoes and envision what the owner would look like, such as their appearance, actions, etc. They then write a narrative, telling the story of a day in the shoe owner's life. While this lesson plan uses the quotation from To Kill a Mockingbird as a springboard and ties nicely to discussions of the novel, it can be completed even if students are not currently reading the book.

Students will view and describe two cyanotypes. The class will write a poem describing an object in nature.  Students will create a balanced composition using found objects from nature on NaturePrint Paper. They will write a cinquain poem to describe their composition.  

This video, adapted from material provided by the ECHO partners, presents a telling of the Tlingit myth, "How Raven Gave Light to the World." The story is told by Shirley Kendall (Eagle Moiety), originally from the Alaskan village of Hoonah. It is illustrated with a video of Native dancers and Alaskan scenery, as well as with images depicting Raven.

This resource provides students with the opportunity to analyze stories an myths from diverse cultures.

Students have an opportunity to create an outstanding Readers Theatre performance within groups to compete for the title of Reading Idol. Students are given scripts to practice their roles within Readers Theatre. Throughout the week, groups practice repeatedly until the performance day. On the performance day, students take turns performing and evaluating their own work and the performances of other groups before voting on a winning performance. All groups are required to create a podcast of their performance. The Reading Idol winners are also recorded by video and uploaded to the teacher's website for others to view.

This is an online interactive about soundalike words (homophones) from Merriam-Webster. Words like their/there and to/too are “homophones” — they sound alike but have different meanings, so they often cause mistakes. Students can try playing this quiz of other tricky homophones and see how well they do/dew. Students may choose to set the timer or play without the timer. 

Verbals are verbs disguised as nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Verbals come in three forms: gerunds, infinitives, and participles. Gerunds are verbs that end in "-ing" and function as nouns. Participles end in "-ing," "-ed," "-d," "-t," "-en," "-n" and function as adjectives. Infinitives are the base form plus the word "to" and function as nouns, adjectives, or adverbs. This resource provides instruction and practice in identifying verbals. 

Healthcare workers often write reports, charts, and emails. Writing clearly and accurately is critical to patient care and success in the medical field. This resource provides instruction and discussion about the audience, purpose, and functions of workplace documents. 

This lesson uses music and art in a vocabulary study of unfamiliar words from the song "America the Beautiful," increasing students' vocabulary while also increasing their knowledge of U.S. geography. A discussion to activate students' prior knowledge about sights and scenery throughout the United States is followed by a read-aloud and introduction to the song "America the Beautiful," which is then sung in each session of the lesson. Students learn the meanings of the song's words through shared reading and the use of context clues and images. Students then use photographs, illustrations, and descriptive language to create a mural shaped like the United States. Finally, through pictures and words, students reflect on what they have learned. This lesson is appropriate and adaptable for any patriotic event or holiday, and many of the vocabulary strategies are adaptable for other texts or word lists, as well.

In this lesson, students will identify how animals and elements of nature are represented by dancers. They will read poetry by Indigenous and Native Peoples of North America.  Using basic locomotor movement, students will choreograph and perform a dance from a poem.    

This lesson is not about markers over pencils; it is about developing a relationship between students and media and how such nurtured connections can support students' ideas in what they write and how they write it. Through in-class discussions about writing/drawing materials and carefully observing how an illustrator uses media to communicate ideas, students will see how materials can extend knowledge. This lesson provides opportunities for students to explore and experience the meaning potential of everyday writing and drawing tools in their own writing. The lesson can (and should be) adapted for older students.

In this video, students learn why it's important to take turns speaking and listening while having a conversation.

A strong argumentative essay starts with a clear and concise topic that you care about and can research. Get tips for forming and developing an argument that will hook your audience and set the platform for a convincing essay.

This tool will assist students in selecting and narrowing a topic.

In this learning activity, students will gather information about personal experiences of survivors of Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. Students communicate the information they learn by creating their own comic to retell the story of the survivors. Resource links to videos, journals, articles, comic book template and artwork are included in the material. 

If you have ever had your class interrupted by a thunderstorm or by a bug crawling across the carpet, you know that students naturally question the world around them. This lesson encourages second-grade students to ask questions about a specific topic, choose a particular question to explore in detail, and research the question using a variety of resources. Students organize their information on a "What we think we know," "What we have confirmed we know," and "New facts we have learned through research" (TCF) chart. They then collaborate to write a class scientific explanation.

Alphabats - Alliteration is a super fun way for kids to practice phonemic awareness. Click on the bats’ bellies to hear the words, then match the words with the same beginning sounds. Match 6 words correctly, then help the bats collect fireflies!

Students take notes to determine the most important information given in a video segment and written text. They compare the information and draw written conclusions about the importance of studying the pig frog and the Everglades.

This resource supports students as they discover explicit and implicit meaning from an informational text.

What makes a shadow? Do shadows change? Can a person escape his or her shadow? These and many other questions provide the framework for students to explore their prior knowledge about shadows as fiction, informational texts, and poetry. In this lesson, language arts skills are linked to the learning of science in a literacy-based approach to the study of shadows. Through discussion of the literature on shadows and the use of questioning techniques to probe prior knowledge, students begin to explore scientific concepts and develop and test hypotheses. After studying shadows, recording observations of shadows, and hearing poetry about shadows, students create their own poetic response incorporating their knowledge. The inclusion of poetry in the lesson encourages aesthetic appreciation of scientific phenomena and invites students to observe the world around them from new perspectives.

The teacher will present an informational text from the website, ReadWorks. The students and teacher can interact with this non-fiction text by annotating the text digitally. The students will answer the questions associated with the article as an assessment. This learning activity can be used as an introduction to transparent, translucent, opaque, and reflective materials, serve as reinforcement after students have already learned these concepts, or be used as an assessment at the conclusion of a lesson. This informational text could provide background knowledge before students investigate materials that are transparent, translucent, opaque, or reflective. 

Say What?! is a crazy way to help children learn how the English language is structured. These kinds of Mad Libs games have been popular for decades, and now with this online style, children can create their own stories. They'll have to blindly choose from nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and much more. Learning about parts of speech in context is what makes online Mad Libs games so effective.