Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–4 Professional Commentary: In this lesson students are taught to write well-organized informational articles that include paragraphs that: 1) support the main idea, 2) have a topic sentence near the beginning of the first paragraph, and 3) include supportive facts and details. Students pretend they are reporters looking for a different angle. Past historical events are chosen that contain subject matter that could support an imaginative approach. Students brainstorm and web ideas that help them think of novel ideas and catchy headlines for their writing.... Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–4 Professional Commentary: Using images from the popular I Spy books, this lesson guides students in descriptive writing. Following a discussion of descriptive language, students work in small groups to describe a scene from an I Spy book and present it to the entire class.... Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: Science Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–5 Professional Commentary: In this promising practice lesson, students investigate how to build a simple electrical circuit learning how the parts of the system interact. This inquiry lesson encourages students to discover how a bulb, battery, and wire must be arranged so that the bulb will light.... 1104 Dirtmeister Science Reporters: Erosion Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: Science Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–5 Professional Commentary: This promising practice lesson challenges students to answer the question, "How do the forces of erosion change the world in which we live?" To answer the questions students explore their neighborhood to investigate one way that erosion shapes the area where they live. They then report their findings.... 1105 Action Is Character: Exploring Character Traits with Adjectives Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–8 Professional Commentary: In this lesson on characterization, students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters with lists of strong adjectives. When the lists are posted in class, peers try to identify the characters.... 1106 Alphabiography Project: Totally You Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–8 Professional Commentary: Instead of writing their life stories in a linear fashion, in this nontraditional autobiography activity, students arrange events from A to Z. The format is inspired by the book Totally Joe by James Howe.... 1107 Boys Read: Considering Courage in Novels Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–8 Professional Commentary: In this lesson designed to motivate adolescent boys to read, they are given a selection of five young adult novels with distinct male protagonists. A suggested booklist is provided.... 1108 Comparing and Contrasting: Picturing an Organizational Pattern Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–8 Professional Commentary: This lesson, designed to be used in conjunction with comparison/contrast writing assignments, uses picture books as mentor texts. There are specific suggestions for texts that provide examples of point-by-point, whole-to-whole, or similarities-to-differences patterns. Students can decide what organizational patterns and transitional words will work best for their own purposes and apply them to their papers.... 1109 Creative Writing Through Wordless Picture Books Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–8 Professional Commentary: In this lesson, students use wordless picture books to provide ideas and topics for creative writing. Wordless picture book, You Can't Take a Balloon into the National Gallery, is used for teacher modeling. Students then work together to develop their own story lines orally and in writing. Opportunities are provided for working in pairs, small groups, and individually. An online, interactive Story Map is used to... 1110 Empowered Fiction Writers: Generating and Organizing Ideas for Story Writing Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–8 Professional Commentary: In this three-part lesson, students use timed speedwriting (also called free writing) as a prewriting technique for a narrative. To help introduce this strategy, posters on speedwriting’s purposes, benefits, and rules are available at the website.... |