Worksheets and activities with answer keys to help students of differing levels identify the tone used in selected passages.

This teacher's guide for Totally Joe by James Howe contains discussion questions, activities, and research assignments.

In this lesson, students will explore text structures of nonfiction texts, identify transitions and text structures to draw conclusions and make inferences about the author's purpose, and identify relevant parts of a text to reflect the author's purpose.

The Researching to Deepen Understanding units lay out an inquiry process through which students learn how to deepen their understanding of topics. Students pose and refine inquiry questions, exploring areas they wish to investigate. They find and assess sources and organize researched material in ways that will support their analysis and integration of information. As their inquiry progresses, they evaluate and extend their research, synthesize their information, and eventually express their evolving evidence-based perspective.

In this lesson utilizing knowledge of sentence structure, students will read Lewis Carroll’s poem, Jabberwocky, focusing on the tone of each stanza and the variety of words that could be considered ’nonsense.’ By focusing on the adjectives, students will then replace those words with different ones in order to create different tones and point of view.

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.

The narrator of The White Umbrella is a Chinese American girl who struggles with feelings of embarrassment and longing to be like others. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Brian Aldiss describes a futuristic world in which machines are capable of thinking based on the tasks they have been designed to perform. One day the machines realize that the few remaining humans have died, leaving the machines to fend for themselves. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story with text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

After an overview of the events surrounding Paul Revere's famous ride, this lesson challenges students to think about the reasons for that fame. Using both primary and secondhand accounts, students compare the account of Revere's ride in Longfellow's famous poem with actual historical events, in order to answer the question: why does Revere's ride occupy such a prominent place in the American consciousness?

Explore the traditions and conventions of haiku and compare this classic form of Japanese poetry to a related genre of Japanese visual art.

“The Wreck of the Hesperus” is a narrative poem about an arrogant ship captain (skipper) who takes his daughter on an ill-fated voyage across a wintry sea. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this poem through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students will explore how myths provide explanations for nature and science. They will read and analyze the Native American myth "Giants and Mosquitoes." They will relate the myth to other creation myths and their own experiences. Afterwards, they will write their own original myth using the writing process.

In this lesson asks students to reflect on their writing process, and helps the teacher learn more about students' habits and techniques as writers. Students begin by reading and analyzing the poem "The Writer" by Richard Wilbur, particularly discussing the use of extended metaphor. Students then reflect on their own writing habits, compare themselves as writers to the writer in the poem, and brainstorm possible metaphors for themselves as writers.