This is a cross-curricular activity that uses the story Alexander, Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday to practice money and decimal skills in addition to reading and writing skills. After reading or hearing the story, students will complete the attached worksheet. (If it's read aloud, students would need a way to refer back to the story to answer the questions. The worksheet has a mixture of reading and math questions. It can be edited if you choose. It can be used for either 3rd or 4th grade. With slight modifications, it could also be used for middle school EL students to learn about currency.  

This is the original overview - This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary using the children's novel, Charlotte's Web. A story of friendship and loyalty between Wilbur, a spring pic and a grey spider named Charlotte. Wilbur learns that he is being fattened for slaughter in the fall. Wilbur is at first disgusted by the fact that charlotte eats flies, but comes to both appreciate and love her.The remix plan is to use the actual novel but could be done just using this section of the book. All students would create their own summaries. 

 Each student writes a one paragraph summary of a chapter of a book and then illustrates their chapter. It can be used for a book the whole class is reading so then all of the summaries are collected and bound together to create a “summary book” of the book read. This activity can be used for both fiction and non-fiction books in any subject and any grade, although this activity is linked to upper primary SOLs. This activity assesses reading comprehension and practices all writing skills. It also includes Art SOLs, and if you have students create their final products on the computer, then you would be incorporating the Computer Technology SOLs as well. If it is used for a non-fiction text in a different content class, then the activity would also cover those SOLs. It can be used for EL classes in middle school also. 

Words matter, and the words we say to ourselves matter most of all.Through a series of reflective questions, students find their "one word" of focus to encourage and inspire them in the coming months. Appropriate for the beginning of the school year, the start of a new calendar year, or anytime in between, this lesson plan includes ideas for incorporating personal goal setting with writing, digital learning integration, and a follow-up lesson integrating computer science. 

Let’s take a look at three Virginia industries (agriculture, technology, and shipbuilding).  Then we will ask an industry expert a question that we have about their particular area.  Some of our questions will be emailed and some will be “snail mailed”.  We will discuss the pros and cons of both of those types of correspondence and talk about networking and the internet. 

      Using the picture book The True Story of the Three Pigs by A. Wolf  as told to Jon Scieska, students will complete math word problems that cover the measurement SOLs. They will also write their own “true story” of another fairy tale, which covers the English writing SOLs. An extension of this unit could be to have students create math word problems based on their new story and have their classmates solve them. This lesson can also be used as an art activity if the story is illustrated. If technology is available, it can be an opportunity for students to practice their computer skills to create a final version of their new illustrated fairy tale or to use the computer to illustrate it.  

In this activity/ lesson students will conduct research about a given or chosen profession, interview a professional in the field via video conferencing, and write a short article, essay, journal entry, or blog about their experience and the information they gathered.

Students will plan out their family’s vacation to visit important water features in Virginia, then write a fiction story about their vacation.

Students will create a fictional story using a graphic organizer to plan details by breaking the story down into smaller parts before writing.