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.
Using Art to Practice Reading When you're teaching a reading skill, can you replace some of those dull sample texts with glorious artwork?
Think Like A Philosopher Up near the top of Bloom’s taxonomy is “evaluating.” A great use of this level of thinking is to evaluate a character’s ethical choice. But we can go deeper! Let’s ask students to evaluate characters’ actions based on another character’s point of view. To add another layer, we’ll teach kids about philosophers and use their points of view as well.
Exploring Palindromes in ELA and Math Palindromes are one of those fun ideas that some gifted kids just latch onto. We'll check out palindromic words, phrases, and even numbers in this article.
Analyzing Suffixes Inductively The year opens with a vocabulary skill analyzing "Suffixes: -ful, -less, -ly." I adjusted this lesson to examine how these suffixes change the part of speech of words, rather than the meaning.
Coats of Arms, Seals, and Other Heraldry Symbolic seals, crests, and coats of arms are a common concept across cultures. From the simplicity of Japanese mon to the regality of English coats of arms all the way to America’s Great Seal, humans around the world create graphical representations of themselves.
Patterns In Writing: Conflict Discussing types of conflict is a great first step towards building a strong narrative. Although the term conjures up images of ninja battles for many of our students, conflict can take on many more sophisticated forms than physical fights.
What Did You (Not) Do During Summer Break? Ask your students to write about their summer breaks, but remix their activities into a new genre or setting. Perhaps they vacationed at Hogwarts, Mordor, or Tatooine? Not interested in a writing assignment?
