This lesson plan, The Power of Freedom, focuses on Dr. Martin Luther King’s most well-known and frequently taught classic works, like “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream.” Students read and discuss the themes in both works and connect to events in their lives today.

This resource is a nonfiction, Common Core aligned reading passage with textual analysis questions about main idea and supporting details. Also incuded are mutiple choice textual analysis questions.

Speech writing is a rhetorical art and provides the content for these scaffolded lessons that support the increased cognitive rigor of literacy standards with presidential writings.

RAFT is a writing strategy that helps students understand their role as a writer, the audience they will address, the varied formats for writing, and the topic they'll be writing about. By using this strategy, teachers encourage students to write creatively, to consider a topic from a different perspective, and to gain practice writing for different audiences. Students learn to respond to a writing prompt that requires them to think about various perspectives.

In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

The story Raymond's Run is told through the eyes of Hazel Squeaky Parker, who is the fastest runner in her Harlem neighborhood. She spends the majority of her time practicing for upcoming races and taking care of her brother, Raymond, who is mentally challenged and to whom she is very devoted. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Through various poems, students will consider the elements involved in reading poetry aloud.

In this lesson, students read informational pieces about whether or not schools should teach cursive writing. They will evaluate the arguments presented and then choose a side of the issue. Finally, they will write their own arguments expressing their points of view.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 6th Grade Math.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 8th Grade ELA. 

The speaker reflects on the risks and responsibilities of making choices and deciding which road to take. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this poem through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this Random House teacher's guide to Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye, students will explore the life of Leroy "Satchel" Paige and the history of Jim Crow era America. The guide includes indepth discussion questions and activities designed to facilitate synthesis and connection through higher level discourse and writing prompts.

Students will use scaffolding to research and organize information for writing a research paper. A research paper scaffold provides students with clear support for writing expository papers that include a question (problem), literature review, analysis, methodology for original research, results, conclusion, and references. Students examine informational text, use an inquiry-based approach, and practice genre-specific strategies for expository writing.

“The Secret” tells the story of Henry Cooper, a reporter, returning for the second time to report on the colonies now existing on the Moon. Based on a hunch, he becomes suspicious of a “secret” that may be looming on the Moon. Cooper sets out on a mission to confirm his suspicions, which leads him to discover that life on the moon can be as long as 200 years. Cooper must then decide if this “secret” should be kept or shared with those back on Earth. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Selective Highlighting/Underlining is used to help students organize what they have read by selecting what is important. This strategy teaches students to highlight/underline ONLY the key words, phrases, vocabulary, and ideas that are central to understanding the reading.

This teachers guide for Somewhere There is Still a Sun by Michael Gruenbaum with Todd Hasak-Lowy includes discussion questions and prompts for interpretation for each part of the book, assignments and worksheets, ideas to integrate visual media, and writing assignment ideas.

This lesson, focused on profile writing and its unique characteristics, considers the profiles developed in the film The Soul of a Man. The film's profiles of three blues musicians provide the basis for complementary activities that ask students to consider the meaning of a man's soul and how a person's life exposes the contents of that soul.

This resource is a collection of discussion questions to supplement Sounds of the River by Da Chen, the story of a young Bejing teenager Da Chen who takes his first train ride away from the farm he was raised on to his new university life in Beijing. He soon faces a host of ghastly challenges, including poor living conditions, lack of food, and suicidal roommates.