In this resource, PBS NewsHour Extra helps teachers and students identify the who, what, when, where and why-it-matters of major national and international news stories. The Daily News Story takes the best of the PBS NewsHour news program and pairs it with discussion questions, CCSS lesson plans and stories developed specifically for students.

Students will view a reality television episode and read a news article related to reality television. Then students will complete a graphic organizer to create an argument for or against children participating in reality television. Students will apply supportive details for writing a persuasive paragraph.

Experiencing the language of great poets provides a rich learning context for students, giving them access to the best examples of how words can be arranged in unique ways. By studying the works of renowned poets across cultures and histories, students extract knowledge about figurative language and poetic devices from masters of the craft. In this lesson, students learn about personification by reading and discussing poems that feature this writing device. Then they use the poems as a guide to brainstorm lists of nouns and verbs that they randomly arrange to create personification in their own poems.

The story's narrator notices one morning that his nine-year-old son is ill. The boy reveals that while at school in France he heard that a person cannot live with a temperature over 44. The father explains the difference between the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales and tells his son that he is not going to die. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

The following unit incorporates multimedia and classroom activities to encourage students to explore and interact with poetry by first writing letters to important historical poets as practice for writing letters to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors, a group that represents poetry in America at its best.

Students will study poems about death, including A.E. Houseman's "To an Athlete Dying Young" and Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night." Students will be able to read, analyze and interpret the poems from both the thematic level of death and the detailed level of poetic form. This lesson also includes a guided analysis of a Shakespearean sonnet.

In this minilesson, students explore the dystopian characteristics and symbols presented in the "1984" Macintosh commercial and analyze the comments that it makes about contemporary society. This activity is also an effective introduction to George Orwell's 1984 because of the direct allusions to the novel in the commercial or can also be used as a follow-up.

Students analyze characters by noting the ways in which defining moments shape their personalities in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Students will chart changes, note the “direction” of their characters, support their conclusions with textual evidence, and present their findings.

After reading Richard Wright’s short novel Rite of Passage, students will demonstrate their understanding of
plot, character, and conflict by writing recommendations for the protagonists’ future to a juvenile court system
judge. Students are guided through the development of these recommendations, including attention to
counterarguments based on potential prevailing attitudes in the justice system at the time.

This lesson helps students improve their writing abilities and their attention to details while experiencing a new technology called Descriptive Video. Also known as described programming, Descriptive Video refers to programming with an additional audio track that narrates a film’s visual elements. Students watch the opening scene of the standard version of the Disney film, The Lion King, and write a description of it. They then watch the same opening scene with the descriptions and captions available online at the National Center for Accessible Media. They will write another descriptive summary on this scene. Students share their two writing samples aloud and compare their pre- and post-audio descriptions.

In this lesson, students explore key elements of design such as color, shape, size, texture, density, and layout to understand and appreciate how these elements combine to convey meaning in Little Blue and Little Yellow, by Leo Lionni. Using art and digital media, they will then create their own designs to express meaning for setting, character relationships, and plot.

In this lesson, students use focused prewriting strategies to explore content and ethical issues related to a persuasive assignment. These strategies work best after students have established their topic and audience and have begun exploring their rhetorical (writing) situation as it relates to a specific, local problem about which they have some knowledge.

In this introductory lesson, students engage in a hands-on, collaborative investigation of the definition of reading by participating in small group brainstorming sessions and an analysis of a variety of texts and the strategies they need to read them. Students also create individual Reader’s Profiles with an online tool modeled on social networking sites. Sharing these profiles and reflecting on their own learning, students ultimately develop a working definition of reading which they refine during the year.

Students explore a variety of nonfiction books and compare them to fiction. Students also learn about different categories of nonfiction writing and practice identifying books that fall into these categories. They record their thinking and new learning and discuss them as a class.

This interactive resource helps students make a diamante poem. Students work with the computer to create a diamante poem using specific words and/or adjectives. Students can print or save their work when finished.

A student handout on parts to a dictionary, tips, and how to look up words.

E-book readers, or digital readers, are devices that can host thousands of electronic books and allows readers to interact with digital texts through the use of e-book tools and features. In this lesson, students will read e-books and use digital tools (dictionaries and notes) to support their development of vocabulary. Specifically, students will assume roles of “word detectives” as they look up words in digital dictionaries and use other strategies to identify the meaning of vocabulary words.

This lesson was designed to help students gain social studies/history content knowledge by using textual evidence to answer text-dependent questions.

This lesson and resource uses point-by-point arguments to help students develop higher order thinking skills by learning to distinguish fact from opinion.