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.... 824 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.... 825 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.... 826 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.... 827 Taking Photos of Curious George: Exploring Character Through Images Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades K–2 Professional Commentary: In this lesson, students use images and texts to explore the familiar character, Curious George. After reading and discussing the book, students create a web with insights about George's character.... 828 Finding Poetry in Prose: Reading and Writing Love Poems Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 9–12 Professional Commentary: When students think of love poetry, they almost invariably think of poetry about romantic love. This lesson expands the concept of love poems to move beyond romantic love to explore other kinds of love, particularly the love within a family.... 829 Elie Wiesel: First Person Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 9–12 Professional Commentary: This lesson on Elie Wiesel, and his Holocaust memoir Night may be used with or without Ken Burns' PBS video Elie Wiesel: First Person Singular. It is divided into three activities.... Resource Type: Instructional Resource -- Promising Practice Discipline: English Language Arts Ohio Standards Alignment: Grades 3–4 Professional Commentary: This lesson focuses on using conversational language and music to introduce the concept of similes by building language acquisition and helping students to develop a positive attitude about learning language. Using picture books and a common nursery rhyme, students are introduced to the concept of similes and afforded opportunities to practice identifying similies found in texts.... |