Grab your popcorn and your overpriced beverage, because we’re going to the movies! Okay, we’re not actually going to the movies, but imagine that kind of hype in your classroom? Using movie trailers in your lessons generates instant, edge of your seat enthusiasm and provides students with what they perceive to be a “fun text” […]

Teaching students to identify narrative point of view in literature and write in a consistent perspective can be pretty dry material, but with these five activity ideas, your lesson will go from blah to ah-hah! Using Excerpts Use short story and novel excerpts to teach each of the narrative points of view. Using mentor texts […]

Making inferences or “reading between the lines” can be one of the trickier skills for students to adapt into their literacy toolkit. I teach my students that when they infer, they are taking the explicit information that the text gives them and combining it with their own thoughts and interpretations based on textual clues to […]

Comedic sketches, parodies, and stand-up comedy are a big part of the entertainment that our students tend to consume, yet it’s tricky to incorporate these genres into the classroom due to the sometimes inappropriate nature of the material. It can be time consuming to search through the endless content on YouTube to find one video […]

Teaching students to visualize while they read is an essential skill in becoming an active reader because it enables them to make inferences while they read, recall and summarize the text, and make a deeper connection to the text by visually demonstrating their unique interpretation of it. While some students love the opportunity to get […]