The lesson, which focuses on vocal renderings of poems, will encourage students to discerning meaning through tone of voice, inflection and context.

This teacher's guide for Little Green by Chun Yu includes background information on the Cultural Revolution, discussion questions, activities, writing practices, and collaborative exercises.

In the short story, "Lob’s Girl," a girl, Sandy, and her dog, Lob, create an emotional bond that provides the will to survive. The story follows a chronological sequence from the time Sandy and Lob first met, how they strengthen their bond through life events, to the culminating accident where Sandy is seriously injured and Lob helps revive her in the most mysterious manner. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

The Lost City of the Aztecs is about the demise of the Aztec Empire and how Montezuma, the last Aztec emperor, reacted to the arrival of the Spaniards at Tenochtitlan in 1519. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this history through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This activity tells the story of Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani activitst and youngest winner of the Noble Peace Prize.

In this activity, students read, Masks, a poem from Silverstein’s book of poems called Everything On It.

In this lesson students examine how imagery is used to represent ideas, themes, periods of history, and make cultural connections to poem, "Still I Rise." Students will reflect through written expression how resiliency is in their lives, school, and community.

In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will explore the Harlem Writers Guild, the oldest African American writers association in the world. Teaching tips suggest asking students to research the Harlem Writers Guild and to think about writing as part of a community.

In this lesson that tightly integrates personal writing, research, and thematic response to literature, students discuss the importance of having a recorded history of humanity. As they explore this topic, they gain a deeper understanding of the horror of Jonas’s dystopian society in Lois Lowry’s The Giver. This understanding generates a keen interest in and context for the descriptive writing of students’ own history. Students gather ideas from several sources, including their own memories, interviews, and photographs, and then write their own descriptive memoirs.

In this lesson, students will read a passage of Dragonwings and then identify and interpret the figurative laungauge in the passage.

In this lesson, students will read a passage of Flush and identify and interpret point of view and plot development in Flush.

In this lesson, students will complete the mid unit assessment using the final stanza of the poem.

In this lesson, students are asked to both identify/interpret the figurative language in this passage. They use a graphic organizer identical to the one they used to track figurative language.

In this lesson, students are asked to tread the monologue "Pask, the Runaway" in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! and consider how the author's word choice contributes to tone and theme development.

This teacher's guide for The Misfits by James Howe containes discussion questions, activities, and research assignments.

In this lesson, students study poems to see how punctuation, line length, rhythm, and word choice can be used to create a memorable moment.

A teachers guide for My Sisters' Voices: Teenage Girls of Color Speak Out by Iris Jacob including questions for deeper comprehension, exercises for the class, and suggestions for further reading.

A young Bedouin girl has earned the nickname Nadia the Willful because of her quick temper. Her brother, Hamed, is the only one who can tame her temper. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

What should a good narrative contain? For this lesson, a mystery, a type of narrative realistic fiction, will be composed. Since strong adjectives and adverbs will support a mystery, they will be incorporated into the writing.

In this lesson, students will continue to analyze point of view and figurative language.