On the first day of seventh grade, Victor and his friend Michael try to hide their insecurities and impress the girls in their class. In turn they learn that teachers can be kind, that girls are approachable, and that taking a risk to fit in can pay off. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Students will define, create, and use punctuation to correctly write various sentence types.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a legend about King Arthur’s court and the Knights of the Round Table. During a New Years celebration, a strange man, only referred to as the Green Knight, enters the court and challenges the knights to a game. He will allow whoever accepts the challenge to strike him with his own ax. There is one condition, the challenger must return in one year for the Green Knight to return the same blow. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This fantasy takes place on the planet Pern, an imaginary world where dragons help protect the inhabitants from the dangerous Red Star, which rains deadly plant spores every 200 years. These spores can devour every living thing if they land on the planet. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students are given two excerpts from a classic literary novel and must identify and correct the discrepancies in subject and verb agreement.

Students are invited to explore the cultural offerings around them "” from architecture to books, dance, fashion, film, food, music, theater, TV and video games "” and write reviews about what they experience. The New York Times models along with advice from current Times critics to help them through the process.

Almost every culture has a traditional tale about a character who is granted three wishes. Two are usually used unwisely, and then the third wish is needed to undo one or both of the first two wishes. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Megan’s Great-grandmother Breckenridge has lived in three centuries. She was born in 1899 and now it is 2001. On the first day of 2001, Megan is annoyed that she and her mother are going to visit Great-grandmother Breckenridge in an Elder Care Facility. By the end of her visit, Megan’s feelings and opinions about Great-grandmother Breckenridge have changed from distaste and avoidance to eagerness to know her better. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This horror story begins when three lighthouse keepers realize that a derelict ship heading for their tiny island is filled with thousands of giant rats. The ship runs aground and sinks; the famished rats scramble onto the island, and, in time, they break into the lighthouse. The besieged men struggle to stay alive. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Fourteen year-old Greg Ridley gets into an argument with his father over his bad grades and his father forbids him to play basketball. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This is a story of an American-born Chinese daughter, her immigrant mother and their very different beliefs and hopes. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

A sixth grade boy lives with his mother. The mother maintains their livelihood with a blue collar job. In the story, William wants to find a cure for unhappiness that he sees in his mother and a man on the street. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson geared for ELL or regular education students, the students will develop an understanding of their own experiences from their native home and relate them to the text. This text helps trigger memories, as well as gives students appropritate examples of past tense uses. Students can explore the story further by researching the author before reading and sharing experiences in a similar format.

This lesson invites students to reconfigure Meg’s journey into a board game where, as in the novel itself, Meg’s progress is either thwarted or advanced by aspects of her emotional responses to situations, her changing sense of self, and her physical and intellectual experiences.

After looking at various pictures, the students, as a class, identify the ones illustrating action verbs. Then, after looking at a picture individually, students write sentences using strong, active verbs summarizing the action in the picture.