Think alphabet books are just for kindergarten? Think again! In this lesson, students examine a variety of alphabet books, some with rather complex structures, specifically Mary Elting and Michael Folsom's Q Is for Duck: An Alphabet Guessing Game. Students begin the lesson with a read-aloud of the story in which they guess why the authors chose to represent each letter with a particular word and then summarize the pattern of the book. Using "patterned" or "structured" writing can be very effective with struggling writers, and it also allows advanced students to extend their writing capabilities. Students use the pattern of Q Is for Duck to create their own class alphabet book in which students make clever associations for each letter of the alphabet. This experience will assist even the most reluctant writer in becoming an author.
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 to introduce students to the varying habitats of living things, serve as reinforcement after students have already learned this concept, or be used as an assessment at the conclusion of a lesson.
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Capitalization means using a capital letter at the head of a word. When you capitalize words, you set them apart from other words to highlight a special quality. In this informational resource, students will learn how to follow capitalization rules. Games and worksheets are provided with this resource.
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This is a lesson plan from Google Education's Applied Digital Skills. During this lesson, students will begin the process of understanding how to create an if/then pseudocode by writing an if/then adventure story. As they complete the lesson, students will collaborate with other students in a document to create a story, create a slide presentation with a group and digitally share it with others, make decisions in groups effectively, and create an engaging, visually exciting interactive story.
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This video, adapted from material provided by the ECHO partners, presents the telling of the story, "Maui and the Creation of the Islands" by Tom Cummings of Hawai‘i's Bishop Museum. It features storyteller Kealoha Kelekolio, and is illustrated with images and graphics of the Hawaiian Islands.
This resource provides students with the opportunity to analyze stories an myths from diverse cultures.
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This lesson will help students identify the moral of the story The Empty Pot by Demi. During this lesson, students will have an opportunity to discuss and write about the character trait honesty. Students will share about a time when they demonstrated this character trait.
This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.
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Students will silently view and read a primary document that shows the U.S. arrival sites of enslaved Africans from the 16th through the 19th century and features accompanying informational text. The teacher will read the text of the document aloud. Students will break into groups and read the same text orally with accuracy, automaticity, appropriate prosody or expression, purpose, and understanding, self-correcting, and rereading as necessary. After reading the document in these three ways, students will write a brief response identifying centers of slave trade in the Continental U.S., specifically noting Alabama as one of those centers, and identifying an important date in the history of the slave trade that they will add to a timeline.
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In addition to developing background knowledge about allusions and the etymology of keywords, students use an online tool to examine the relationship between the speaker and his father in Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays". Then students explore how the poet uses consonance, assonance, and alliteration to illustrate this complex relationship. Finally, students use the idea of a composed memory and their knowledge of sonic patterns to draft, revise, and share their own original text.
The updated link for the BioCube resource is https://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives/cube.
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This reading comprehension activity from MrNussbaum.com contains a historical passage about Hank Aaron. Students can read this passage as an introductory lesson or as an assessment using the questions included. Students receive immediate feedback on multiple-choice questions. Students may click on "listen" to have the passage read to them.
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Verbs have a singular and a plural form. When using a verb in a sentence, pay attention to the subject-verb agreement. This means, that the subject and the verb must agree in number. In this lesson, students will learn about subject-verb agreement. This resource offers videos, games, and worksheets to help further understand the concept taught in this lesson.
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In this activity, the student will determine how rhetorical style contributes to the meaning of fiction. The student will follow along with the teacher as he/she presents notes on rhetorical style and meaning in fiction to complete a note sheet. This activity will help the students define, identify, and interpret two types of rhetorical styles which contribute to the meaning of fiction.
This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
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Save the Earth from all kinds of waste and trash. Rap with Mister C, read charts with a landfill rat, break the code for recycling symbols, then share this dirty, rotten, self-paced lesson with your friends.
This resource guides students as they identify the main idea and support details of a text.
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This lesson teaches personification as a form of figurative language. Students will be introduced to characters and objects in stories, poems, and a movie clip that possess human characteristics. This topic can be used as a stand-alone lesson or with a unit on figurative language.
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This video resource will provide fourth- and fifth-grade students with a strategy to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words using context clues. This video demonstrates using the "IDEAS Method" (Inference, Definition, Example, Antonym, and Synonym) to learn new words. By looking at words around a new word, the lesson activity helps students to understand new vocabulary.
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Movies can be an integral part of the language arts classroom when they are used in ways that encourage and develop students' critical thinking. In this activity, students explore matching texts—novels and the movies adapted from them—to develop their analytical strategies. They use graphic organizers to draw comparisons between the two texts and hypothesize about the effect of adaptation. They analyze the differences between the two versions by citing specific adaptations in the film version, indicating the effect of each adaptation on the story, and deciding if they felt the change had a positive effect on the overall story. Students then design new DVD covers and a related insert for the movies, reflecting their response to the movie version.
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Students will identify and draw landscape elements for the foreground, middle ground, and background. They will use a stylus to make a scratchboard landscape drawing. They will compose a story about a journey through their landscape. Assessment rubric, letter to parents, examples of artwork, and lesson plan included in PDF.
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The teacher will introduce students to the word syllable and demonstrate to students how to count syllables in words using the digital tool. Next, the teacher will read a haiku poem to students and have the students count the syllables in the haiku using the strategy demonstrated in the video clip. Lastly, the teacher and students will read a variety of haiku poems, with the teacher encouraging the students to identify the syllable pattern in each poem using non-locomotor movements. The students will use mental math to calculate the number of syllables present in each line of a haiku poem and describe how this pattern supplies rhythm in a haiku.
This activity was created as a result of the Arts COS Resource Development Summit.
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In this learning activity, students will read Dear Basketball by Kobe Bryant. Students will then complete a Poetry Analysis graphic organizer looking for the following literary devices in the poem: metaphor, alliteration, rhyme, hyperbole, repetition, imagery, and personification. Finally, students will explain how using the specific literary device enhances the meaning of the poem.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
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In this activity, students will engage in a shared reading of the poem, "The Snowbird's Song," annotating the text to identify phrases, rhythm, rhyme, and areas to apply a meaningful expression.
This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
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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.
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In this lesson, students will learn about the executive branch of government at the state level, especially related to the first governors of the state of Alabama. Their impact on the development of Alabama and Alabama's role in the United States will be discussed.
Students will use research and note taking skills to gather information on an early governor. Then students will participate in jigsaw groups to share their information, discuss the importance of each governor, similarities, and impact. Finally, students will discuss the role of governor and how governors have an impact on the state and the impact these men had in Alabama and in other states.
This lesson was created in partnership with the Alabama Department of Archives and History.
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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.
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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.
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Students take photographs of themselves making the shapes of letters. They use the ear for the letter C, their mouth for the letter O, or use their entire body and their peer to create the letter B. Let students get creative and create the alphabet with their body. Compile all the letters into a digital alphabet book in which the students must guess which letter the students are trying to represent in the photograph.
This activity was created as a result of the DLCS COS Resource Development Summit.
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Students will show comprehension of key vocabulary by playing a digital learning game on Gimkit. This is a review of the 11 vocabulary terms from Welcome to the Underworld in a paired reading with Chapter 18 of The Lightning Thief.
This resource was created in partnership with Dothan City Schools.
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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.
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This lesson may be taught as part of the Unit Plan - Solutions to Lessen Human Impact on the Environment. In this lesson, the solutions to lessen the human impact on the environment will be explored. Students will communicate their plan during journal writing by producing an informational writing piece that uses the conventions of Standard English such as capitalization and punctuation. At the end of the lesson, the students will peer edit their writing using the provided writing anchor chart.
This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit.
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Science fiction has the potential to spark lively discussions while inviting students to extrapolate from their own working knowledge of scientific principles. This genre offers a human lens to what can otherwise be a complex science concept. In this lesson, students will be able to explore the genre of science fiction, while learning more about the science integrated into the plot of the story using nonfiction texts and resources. They first define the science fiction genre and then read and discuss science fiction texts. Next, they conduct research to find science facts that support or dispute the science included in the plot of the science fiction book they read. Students then revisit their definition of the genre and revise based on their reading. Finally, students complete a project that examines the science fiction genre in relation to real-world science concepts and topics.
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The Story Map interactive includes a set of graphic organizers designed to assist teachers and students in prewriting and post-reading activities. The organizers are intended to focus on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution development. Students can develop multiple characters, for example, in preparation for writing their own fiction, or they may reflect on and further develop characters from stories they have read. After completing individual sections or the entire organizer, students have the ability to print out their final versions for feedback and assessment. The versatility of this tool allows it to be used in multiple contexts.
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Students will be introduced to a technology tool that enables Neil Harbisson, who is color blind, to “see” colors by listening to an audio tone that is assigned to a color, which is sent to him via bone conductivity.
This activity was created as a result of the DLCS COS Resource Development Summit.
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The teacher will use the attached Interactive Google Slide Presentation to assess if the students know the difference between the first and third-person points of view in literary texts.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
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This lesson will utilize the talking drawings strategy, in which students will begin the lesson by drawing a picture of a plant to illustrate how they think plants make their own food. Then, the teacher will introduce the process of photosynthesis using an interactive presentation to explain photosynthesis in a pictorial format. As the teacher describes the process, the students will create a scientifically accurate drawing of a plant engaging in photosynthesis. Lastly, students will create a writing piece that will describe the process of photosynthesis and construct a scientifically accurate illustration of the process of photosynthesis.
This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.
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Studying poetry creates rich opportunities to encourage critical reading and thinking, as students analyze how poetry differs from prose in structure, form, purpose, and language. This lesson begins with a quick-write and a general discussion of the essential question What is poetry? Students are then reminded that different texts require different responses from readers, and to illustrate the differences they explore a poem and a prose selection on the same topic. Students discuss the two texts in cooperative groups, using a list of guiding questions. Each group then develops a list of descriptive statements about poetry, and the groups share their statements during a whole-class discussion that reconsiders the original question.
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This learning activity provides teachers with information on how to conduct a segmentation cheer activity. Educators can write the "Segmentation Cheer" on chart paper, and teach it to children. Each time you say the cheer, change the words in the third line. Have children segment the word sound by sound. Begin with words that have three phonemes, such as ten, rat, cat, dog, soap, read, and fish.
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This activity is used to introduce students to mythology. After this activity, learners will be able to identify and categorize the patterns found in various myths. Students will be able to write arguments to compare and contrast the patterns found in two myths.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.