Shares some of the classroom practices that have worked well in teaching "Naked." Presents a summary of introductory comments about the story and a description of the sketching activity. Offers interpretive commentary on a selection of representative student sketches that reflect significant features of the story. Provides general…

Presents a condensed method for involving students in the kind of theatrical problem-solving that transforms a script to a play. Describes how to incorporate a "human slide show" into the class. Notes that students must read plays not just to understand events, but to make artistic choices about how to stage the action so that an…

Presents the author's experiences as a kind of case study of what it looks and sounds like when "doing" Shakespeare is in the foreground of instruction and "play" is the thing that makes that happen. Discusses guidelines and suggestions for putting a play together. (SG)

Expresses concern over students' weakness for hyperbole. Notes that in order to engage students in the process of exploring what they do not know, teachers need to convince them that clarity and understatement requires as much imagination as hyperbole and exaggeration. Presents a teaching exercise that encourages students to write about what they…

Notes that the author's concern is in identifying an old focus of literacy instruction and giving teachers license to leave it behind to make room for new recommended practices. Suggests that this article is a license to discard time-consuming practices to make room for more meaningful literacy activities. (SG)

Considers how inviting students to play Walker Gibson's "talk-back game" is an excellent way to bring the complications of appropriate tone to life. Describes three steps to incorporate Gibson's concept into the classroom. Notes that Gibson's concept considers the potential resistance of the reader. (SG)

Presents three teachers' suggestions for teaching grammar. Discusses how the first teacher suggests studying active and passive voice, the second teacher has students construct slang dictionaries, and the third teacher uses sentence combining that engages students and encourages carryover to their writing. (SG)

Describes how one foreign language teacher and two English teachers created a program that might work to improve students' control over their language. Combines their collective expertise in teaching languages, studies the research in their surprisingly separate fields, and crosses the gulf between the foreign language and English hallways.…

Recommends eight plays from the 1980s which will challenge the thinking of students with issues such as evolving independence of young people, growing up in the context of racism and discrimination, insights into the world of the deaf, and the suffering of humanity during the French Revolution. (MG)

Describes "Pass the Read," an instructional strategy for oral reading which encourages high levels of student participation, decision making, and active listening. (MM)

Describes a classroom grammatical activity in which the teacher isolates typical sentences from textbooks and writes the individual words on placards. Describes how students are each given a placard and asked to form a sentence. Reports that students enjoyed this activity and began to get the feel of language and sentence structure. (RS)

Discusses ways to use bar charts and line graphs to present comparative information in a flexible manner. Includes activities designed to review how the different characteristics of charts and graphs relate to different document structures. (RS)

Shares how students in one school created book jackets and wrote summaries for school library books. (MG)

Analyzes the junk mail received by the author. Describes a class activity in which students, working in small groups, discuss particular pieces of junk mail and decide which elements of persuasion are the most effective. Describes how students design their own flyers or letters to advertise something. (RS)

Presents three simple exercises (involving analogies, word relationships, and closed sorts) designed to reinforce vocabulary and concepts from content area textbooks. (RS)