181 The Poetics of Hip Hop Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 9–12 Professional Commentary: This lesson combines an analysis of hip hop music and lyrics to provide students with a greater understanding of rhythm, form, diction, and sound in poetry. Students analyze form in Shakespearean sonnets, then analyze hip hop music to determine common characteristics between the Bard's work and the music of hip hop artists.... 182 Word Sorts for Beginning and Struggling Readers Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades K–2 Professional Commentary: This series of lessons provides a framework for introducing students to short-vowel word families. Focusing first on the "a" family, students work together and individually to learn the word families -at, -an, -ap, and -ack.... 183 Using Picture Books to Teach Plot Development and Conflict Resolution Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 4–6 Professional Commentary: This lesson invites students to examine the craft of developing a story's plot and resolution of a story's conflict through focused experiences with picture books. Through the careful analysis of the portrayal of plot conflict using the text and illustrations as cues, students have the opportunity to make connections from their own experiences as readers to... 184 Using QARs to Develop Comprehension and Reflective Reading Habits Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–7 Professional Commentary: Mature readers move from reading for literal comprehension to developing inferential comprehension strategies. This lesson provides a foundation for building reflective reading habits, which enables students to develop these higher-level comprehension strategies.... 185 Questioning: A Comprehension Strategy for Small-Group Guided Reading Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–5 Professional Commentary: In this lesson, students learn to recognize the difference between thin (factual) and thick (inferential) questions. The teacher begins by showing students how to compose question webs by thinking aloud while reading.... 186 The History Behind Song Lyrics Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–8 Professional Commentary: The events described in the lyrics from Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start the Fire" are used as a springboard for this lesson. The lyrics include references to people, places and events from four decades of world occurrences.... Career Fields: Arts & Communication, General Career Skills Projects: Writing 6-12, Standards First 187 Exploring Satire with Shrek Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 9–10 Professional Commentary: In this lesson, students use the familiar characteristics of fairy tales, the movie Shrek, which satirizes fairy tale traditions, as an introduction to the satirical techniques of exaggeration, incongruity, reversal, and parody. Students brainstorm fairy tale characteristics and identify the satirical techniques used to present them in the movie.... Projects: Writing 6-12 188 Internalization of Vocabulary Through the Use of a Word Map Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 6–8 Professional Commentary: This lesson provides students with a concrete way to learn vocabulary. The instruction is interactive, provides practice with words, and develops both definitional and contextual knowledge through two agents---purposeful sequencing of steps and collaboration with peers.... 189 What If We Changed the Book? Problem-Posing with Sixteen Cows Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: Mathematics, English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–4 Professional Commentary: This activity demonstrates the strategy of problem posing (Brown & Walter, 1983/2005). A piece of math-related children’s literature, Sixteen Cows (Wheeler, 2002), is used as the springboard for this problem-posing activity.... 190 Word Study with Henry and Mudge Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Best Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 2–3 Professional Commentary: Struggling readers need instruction in word recognition to improve not only their reading skills but also their writing and spelling skills as well. Applying aspects of the small-group differentiated reading model to a systematic word study of the past tense marker –ed, this lesson helps students identify both base words and suffixes.... |