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Anticipation guides ask students to express an opinion about ideas before they encounter them in a text or unit of study.  Completing anticipation guides prepares students to recognize and connect to these themes as they surface in their learning.  Reviewing anticipation guides at the end of a lesson or unit is one way to help students reflect on how learning new material may have influenced their opinions, perhaps by reinforcing previously held beliefs or by causing ideas to shift. 

Character ChartsGraphic organizers, like the sample below, can be used to help students organize information about major and minor characters in a text.  Completed character charts are useful tools for writing essays and studying for tests. They are often used to record information about literacy characters, but can also be adapted to record information about historical figures.

Document Analysis TemplatesAnalyzing historical documents requires students to identify the purpose, message and audience of a text. Document Analysis Forms are graphic organizers that guide students through a process of identifying important background information about a document (e.g. author/creator, date created, place, format, etc.) and using this data to determine the bias or perspective of a text.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s the emphasis on cursive handwriting today that there was when I was in school,” said Lisa Donohoe, Shelby’s mom.

“We do have a curriculum for cursive handwriting as part of our SLEs (Student Learning Expectations),” said Mary Ellen Maske, executive administrator for elementary education for the Cedar Rapids school district.The district uses the Zaner-Bloser Handwriting curriculum, which introduces cursive handwriting in third grade, and practice in fourth and fifth grades.The goal is 10 to 15 minutes of cursive handwriting instruction each day

Iowa is among 42 states and the District of Columbia, to have adopted the Common Core State Standards for English, which omits cursive handwriting from the required curriculum.