Using text from Doreen Cronin's Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type as shared readings, first-grade students learn word families and how to decode new words in a word family.

Students participate in learning clubs, select content area topics, and draw on texts - including websites, printed material, video, and music - to investigate their topics, and share their learning using similar media.

Students sing a popular children's song, follow along with a picture book that contains the lyrics and illustrations, and then participate in activities to reinforce learning of the vocabulary words.

Modeled on the activities in "Miss Alaineus: A Vocabulary Disaster," a picture book, students combine vocabulary exploration with word play by planning their own vocabulary parade.

Students learn about organic gardening by developing their own research questions, conducting research, gardening at their school, creating signs about their plants, and presenting their research to the class.

Help Spanish-speaking English-language learners unlock the mysteries of their new language by using a bilingual book to recognize unfamiliar words and construct meaning from the text.

The Letter Generator is a useful tool for students to learn the parts of a business or friendly letter and then compose and print letters for both styles of correspondence.

The Letter Poem Creator provides an online model for the thought process involved in creating poems based upon a letter; then, students are invited to experiment with letter poems independently.

Students explore letter poems and experiment with writing letters as poems, using the placement of line breaks to enhance rhythm, sound, meaning, and appearance.

Using their prior knowledge of books containing letters, students show their understanding of genre by rewriting a story and reflecting on how traditional stories differs from stories told in letters.

This lesson invites students to create a "Driver's License" for characters that have made a contribution to western expansion in the United States.

After students have read a book about the Holocaust, such as "The Diary of Anne Frank" or "Night" by Elie Wiesel, students will view "Life is Beautiful" and complete discussion questions to challenge their ability to analyze literature using film.

Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.

Movie music and magic set the scene for this lesson in which students analyze a scene from Good Morning, Vietnam and then create a scene of their own.

The interactive explores the ways that poets choose line breaks in their writing. After viewing the demonstration, students are invited to experiment with line breaks themselves.

After reading a work of literature as a class, students will brainstorm "crimes" committed by characters from that text. Groups of students will work together to act as the prosecution or defense for the selected characters, while also acting as the jury for other groups. Students will use several sources to research for their case, including the novel and internet resources. All the while, students will be writing a persuasive piece to complement their trial work.

While this lesson uses Shakespeare's The Tempest, there are several other text options. Handouts (except for the model case handout) are generic so that they can be used with any text.

Students can map out the key literary elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution as prewriting for their own fiction or as analysis of a text by another author in this secondary-level interactive.

This lesson leads students to reflect on and respond to literature by creating an online scrapbook. Students view a sample electronic scrapbook and use the project rubric to evaluate it, becoming familiar with the project requirements in the process. They use an online tool to evaluate resources on a topic related to a piece of literature and post their evaluations for class reference. Students then use online resources to capture "scraps" of information about their assigned topic and create a scrapbook using PowerPoint or another presentation software, making sure to cite all their sources. They share their online scrapbook with the class, defending their choice of scrapbook entries: why is the entry important to the understanding of the topic?

This lesson focuses on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, but any piece of literature could be used for the basis of an online scrapbook.

Capture students enthusiasm for film and transfer it to reading and literature by substituting film production roles for the traditional literature circle roles.

Students practice different ways of collaborating to read a work of literature. They work in different roles as they compose and answer questions, discover new vocabulary, and examine literary elements.