Language Arts

Compare and Contrast Movie Trailers Over Time

Here's a movie made in 1977, and its trailer is barely watchable! In fact, it almost made me not want to watch Star Wars, a movie I know almost by heart. Perhaps we're onto something interesting for our students to analyze.

Writing Mother’s Day Similes

Mother's Day is coming up, and it's the perfect chance to practice figurative language. Help your students create thoughtful cards, packed with rich similes and metaphors that relate directly to their mothers.

How Do We Make On-Level Writers Into Advanced Writers?

I knew how to help my below-level writers become on-level. But how the heck do you make the next step?

What Influences A Character’s Traits?

To add depth to character analysis, let's look beyond a character's traits and dig into what influenced them to have those traits.

Halloween: Characters Dressed As Characters

What if characters from film or literature dress up like other characters based on some parallel such as: conflict, trait, accomplishment, etc.

A Remix Library

A list of stories inspired by older stories to teach your students about the history of reusing ideas.

Free Verse from A Particular Point of View

My go-to writing task is a free verse poem written from a particular perspective. I learned this idea from my boss, Sandi, who learned it from Joan Franklin Smutny (I think!). You can use ANYTHING as your prompt. A piece of art works well to introduce the idea, but you can move to writing once […]

What Makes An Antagonist Effective?

It's really fun to take an already good sequence, tweak it, and get something even better!

« Previous Page