Tapping existing texts for models is one of the best strategies for writer’s workshop. This lesson examines types of leads in prominent young adult literature and asks students to search for great leads and then try their own hand at writing leads. Students rank several leads from novels as they are read aloud, and then discuss their rankings. Working in small groups, students read alternative leads from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. They then act as a marketing group to select the best lead. Next, students create two new leads for a novel, using different strategies for each. Finally, students apply this process to their own writing, working in pairs to create two alternative leads to something they have written.

In this lesson, student teams read Native American legends from books and websites and write an original legend with enriched word choice and elaboration.

This lesson focuses on character analysis throughout William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies. While contemplating both direct and indirect characterization techniques, students will be able to consider how characterization builds relationships among the boys in the novel.

Students will build speaking and listening skills through discussion, develop fluency and literary understanding, and will build skills in written expression.This resource supports English language development for English Language Learners. This is a full lesson plan focusing on the poem "I'm Nobody." The plan includes activities in all language domains with multiple opportunities for student interaction.

WWII has started and Jimbo Kurasaki and his mother and brother have been confined to an internment camp because they are Japanese. He is not happy, but he copes by deciding that war “makes people crazy.” In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

The following series of activities for the classroom allow students to explore and interact with poetry by writing letters to poets.

This poem, written in a voice of a child, addresses the fears a child faces when starting at a new school and/or being placed in a new classroom. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

This teacher's guide for Lion Island: Cuba's Warrior of Words by Margarita Engle contains information about the book, discussion questions and prompts, activity suggestions including a readers theater, and ways to connect the themes in the book to other subjects.

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.

Four to five person teams will research and present an in-depth TV news special about the Holocaust for the Passover Sedar holiday. Students will conduct research and assume a specific task of their news team to present a main story in a newscast/Podcast.

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 lesson from the New York Times is a collection of activties and lessons to help students make accurate inferences in their own reading.

A series of worksheets with answer keys to help students of differing levels make predictions from selcted texts.

In this lesson, students will use the individual experience of Mary McLeod Bethune to analyze choice, its affects on social equality, and impact on their own life experiences.

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 lesson, students will begin to read the central text, Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief, and identify the narrator of the story.

Students will be introduced to reading through the use of graphic novels. Students will follow different themes in the novel citing quotes to support the different themes in the book.

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.

The activities in this lesson invite students to focus on the characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream, to describe and analyze their conflicts, and then to watch how those conflicts get resolved.