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"This lesson helps students understand copyright, fair use, and plagiarism by focusing on why students should avoid plagiarism and exploring strategies that respect copyright and fair use. The lesson includes three parts, each framed by a KWL chart. In the first part, focusing on plagiarism, students discuss plagiarism and look at examples to determine whether the passages are plagiarized. Part two introduces copyright and fair use. Students use a Think-Pair-Share strategy to explore questions about fair use, then read several scenarios and determine if the uses described are fair use. In the third part, students develop paraphrasing skills through direct practice with paraphrasing text book passages using an online notetaking tool."

Classroom Strategies Explicit strategy instruction is at the core of good comprehension instruction. "Before" strategies activate students' prior knowledge and set a purpose for reading. "During" strategies help students make connections, monitor their understanding, generate questions, and stay focused. "After" strategies provide students an opportunity to summarize, question, reflect, discuss, and respond to text. Teachers should help students to understand why a strategy is useful, how it is used, and when it is appropriate. Teacher demonstration and modeling are critical factors for success, and student discussion following strategy instruction is also helpful. The most frequently researched strategies can be applied across content areas; other content-area specific strategies are emerging, and we will include them here in the future.

This lesson encourages students to use skills and knowledge they may not realize they already have. A classroom game introduces students to the basic concepts of lobbying for something that is important to them (or that they want) and making persuasive arguments. Students then choose their own persuasive piece to analyze and learn some of the definitions associated with persuasive writing. Once students become aware of the techniques used in oral arguments, they then apply them to independent persuasive writing activities.

Assessment Strategies Using Reading Portfolios There are many good reasons, such as the following, for using reading portfolios: * They are an effective assessment tool. * They provide teachers with a wide variety of student work over a period of time. * They not only provide records of student growth, but also opportunities for students to monitor and be involved in their own reading development. * They help students collect, select, inspect, and reflect on their own reading, thus giving them self-assessment skills.

"Welcome to the official Web site for the 2001 American-Canadian Mt. Everest Expedition, brought to you by Touchstone Energy. This educational Web site is designed for teachers and students in elementary and middle school grades. Although Ed Hommer's goal of being the first double amputee to reach the summit of the world's tallest mountain was not achieved, you can read his and other team members' journal entries from Mt. Everest in the Reading Trail section. The expedition was forced to end its quest in October after running out of time and into bad weather. To learn more about this expedition, click on Expedition Basecamp. Included in this site are over 30 lesson plans that address core learning objectives in reading, math, science and social studies. Each lesson plan includes: * A motivating introduction including student directions and learning objectives * Resources students use to complete the lesson (expedition journals and related data, bibliographies, Web site links, etc.) * A student worksheet that can be printed * Assessment strategies and formats "

Often, we receive student writing samples that are too long for our handbooks or that fall into a category already covered by another model. This is where we publish these additional student models. Important Note: If you would like to see one of your models published on our Web site, why not submit it? Click on Publish It! for details. Click on the titles below to see the student models.

This web site provides an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and improving student writing based on the Six Traits Writing model. The links below provide an overview of the model along with the scoring rubrics for each trait. Exercises provided here will give students and teachers a chance to read sample writings, rate them, and compare their ratings with ratings made by English teachers. This will provide a valuable opportunity for both students and teachers to improve their understanding of the Six Traits and, in the end, improve their own writing.

Introduce the power and the purpose of persuasion; develop student knowledge of strategies/techniques associated with persuasion; develop student ability to identify authors' purpose, arguments, and supporting evidence; develop students' abilities to conduct research in order to support a perspective with supporting evidence.

Teach grammar. It provides a metalanguage - a language to describe, use and craft our language. For many of our students Standard Australian English is a foreign dialect. Students need to hear and see correct models of language in use. Provide real reasons for students to speak and write formally. Provide daily opportunties to express complexity of thought, in all subject areas. Insist that the 'click and go' generation ask and respond to both oral and written questions in whole sentences.

Empowered Fiction Writers: Generating and Organizing Ideas for Story Writing Overview This three-part lesson introduces students to the use of speedwriting (also called free writing) as a prewriting technique. Learning the technique of speedwriting allows students to generate a foundation of ideas on which they can build a narrative structure. Students then identify key ideas and phrases in their speedwriting, and organize their ideas around the main elements of a story (exposition, rising action, climax, conclusion).

The ability to read allows individuals access to the full range of a culture's artistic and scientific knowledge. Reading is a complex act. Good readers are able fluently to decode the words on a page, to organize and recall important facts in a text, to distill from a reading the author's opinions and attitudes, and to relate the content of an individual text to a web of other texts previously read. The foundation that reading rests upon is the ability to decode. Emergent readers require the support of more accomplished readers to teach them basic vocabulary, demonstrate word attack strategies, model fluent reading, and provide corrective feedback and encouragement. Newly established readers must build fluency and be pushed to exercise their reading skills across the widest possible range of settings and situations. As the act of decoding becomes more effortless and automatic, the developing reader is able to devote a greater portion of cognitive energy to understanding the meaning of the text. Reading comprehension is not a single skill but consists of a cluster of competencies that range from elementary strategies for identifying and recalling factual content to highly sophisticated techniques for inferring an author's opinions and attitudes. As researcher Michael Pressley points out, reading comprehension skills can be thought of as unfolding along a timeline. Before beginning to read a particular selection, the skilled student reader must engage prior knowledge, predict what the author will say about the topic, and set specific reading goals. While reading, the good reader self-monitors his or her understanding of the text, rereads sentences and longer passages that are unclear, and updates predictions about the text based on what he or she has just read. After completing a text, the good reader summarizes its main points (perhaps writing them down), looks back in the text to clarify any points that are unclear, and continues to think about the text and its imp

The ability to read allows individuals access to the full range of a culture's artistic and scientific knowledge. Reading is a complex act. Good readers are able fluently to decode the words on a page, to organize and recall important facts in a text, to distill from a reading the author's opinions and attitudes, and to relate the content of an individual text to a web of other texts previously read. The foundation that reading rests upon is the ability to decode. Emergent readers require the support of more accomplished readers to teach them basic vocabulary, demonstrate word attack strategies, model fluent reading, and provide corrective feedback and encouragement. Newly established readers must build fluency and be pushed to exercise their reading skills across the widest possible range of settings and situations. As the act of decoding becomes more effortless and automatic, the developing reader is able to devote a greater portion of cognitive energy to understanding the meaning of the text. Reading comprehension is not a single skill but consists of a cluster of competencies that range from elementary strategies for identifying and recalling factual content to highly sophisticated techniques for inferring an author's opinions and attitudes. As researcher Michael Pressley points out, reading comprehension skills can be thought of as unfolding along a timeline. Before beginning to read a particular selection, the skilled student reader must engage prior knowledge, predict what the author will say about the topic, and set specific reading goals. While reading, the good reader self-monitors his or her understanding of the text, rereads sentences and longer passages that are unclear, and updates predictions about the text based on what he or she has just read. After completing a text, the good reader summarizes its main points (perhaps writing them down), looks back in the text to clarify any points that are unclear, and continues to think about the text and its imp

In this activity, students "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using lists of accurate, powerful adjectives. In class discussion, students support their lists with details from the novel.

In this area of the website you will find information on some of the best researched and the most widely implemented methods of helping all students to learn more successfully. The information includes a description of how the teaching and learning strategies work, where they have been applied, results, and where to find further information from experts in the field, books, websites, and other resources. They have been demonstrated to be successful with students of all ages and ability levels, including those with various kinds of disabilities and those who do not learn in traditional ways. Following are links to different teaching and learning strategies, a description of how they work, where they have been applied, results, and where to find more information from individuals, books, web sites, and other resources.

By learning to how to use information presented in various types of nonfiction material, students will prepare to use the multitude of expository texts that readers of all ages encounter daily, including newspapers, brochures, magazines, instruction manuals, recipes, and maps. These lessons can help students understand the differences between fiction and nonfiction and develop reading fluency in this important genre.

One initial lesson for writer's notebooks is to Read Ralph Fletcher's opening story in Keeping a Writer's Notebook. It's about digging a ditch and catching all kinds of critters. He compares writer's notebooks to that ditch -- a space we dig in our busy lives to catch stuff. After reading the story, my students and I brainstorm the different kinds of things we could catch in our writer's notebooks. Then I typed the chart in a format that made it easy for students to tape it to the inside cover of their notebooks. Here's what we came up with:

Text structure refers to the ways that authors organize information in text. For example, some texts are organized as a chronological sequence of events, while others compare two or more things. Teaching students to recognize the underlying structure of content-area texts can help students focus attention on key concepts and relationships, anticipate what's to come, and monitor their comprehension as they read.

The Noyce Foundation's Every Child a Reader and Writer Initiative (ECRW) seeks to improve literacy achievement for students in K-5 utilizing the key strategies of system-wide professional development, classroom coaching and assessment of student work. ECRW began in 2000 and focuses primarily on the teaching of writing through a writing workshop approach.

This unit is intended to familiarize students with some of the basic skills required to write news articles. Students will learn about the structure of news articles, and will practice writing, editing, and critiquing news articles.

"The Writing Workshop, similar to the Reading Workshop, is a method of teaching writing using a workshop method. Students are given opportunities to write in a variety of genres and helps foster a love of writing. The Writing Workshop allows teachers to meet the needs of their students by differentiating their instruction and gearing instruction based on information gathered throughout the workshop."

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