This lesson is one part of a four lesson unit on Shakespeare Stealer. This theater and language arts lesson offers intellectual, creative and interpretive opportunities. Students will analyze and compare the puns and word play in selected scenes from the plays, The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary L. Blackwood and Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. Students will then read scenes from each play in groups and interpret their meanings to prepare for a performance of the scene. The lesson culminates with students writing a short essay explaining how the playwrights used puns and word play to give their characters wit.

This lesson plan provides a basic introduction to Freytag's Pyramid and to the literary element of plot. After viewing a brief presentation about plot structure, students brainstorm the significant events in a story with which they are all familiar and place those events on Freytag’s Pyramid. They work in small groups to map the plot of another story.

After reading the narrative poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll, students use a comic strip format to study the organization and presentation of ideas and supporting details in the plot sequence of the poem.

Behind many of the apparently simple stories of Robert Frost's poems are unexpected questions and mysteries. In this lesson, students analyze what speakers include or omit from their narrative accounts, make inferences about speakers' motivations, and find evidence for their inferences in the words of the poem.

Students will analyze and annotate any form of poetry using this graphic organizer. They will determine the vocabulary, conflict, setting, tone, mood, symbols, and the theme.

Poets achieve popular acclaim only when they express clear and widely shared emotions with a forceful, distinctive, and memorable voice. But what is meant by voice in poetry, and what qualities have made the voice of Langston Hughes a favorite for so many people?

Many students read without questioning a text or analyzing the author's viewpoint. This lesson will introduce students to recognizing point of view of the author. By reading two versions of the same tale and completing an interactive Venn diagram, students recognize that there are not only different versions of a story, but also different viewpoints to consider when reading.

In this lesson, students seek supporting proof of major conflicts and themes in the novel "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton

This lesson uses the postmodern picture book Black and White, by David Macaulay, to engage students in a deep analysis of writer's craft. Macaulay's book presents four separate story lines that playfully interact with one another throughout the text. Students explore ways in which authors use words and illustrations to create unexpected plots and connections within a text.

Power Notes is a strategy that teaches students an efficient form of organizing information from assigned text. This technique provides students a systematic way to look for relationships within material they are reading. Power Notes help visually display the differences between main ideas and supportive information in outline form. Main ideas or categories are assigned a power 1 rating. Details and examples are assigned power 2s, 3s, or 4s.

In this lesson, students will read and discuss "The Hangman" by Maurice Ogden and answer questions about the poem.

Reading Guides help students navigate reading material, especially difficult textbook chapters or technical reading. Students respond to a teacher-created written guide of prompts as they read an assigned text. Reading Guides help students to comprehend the main points of the reading and understand the organizational structure of a text.

In this lesson, students create book reports and share them with the class based on genre.

Refugee by Alan Gratz focuses on the survival of three characters who flee their homelands during a period of war. The novel follows their journies to freedom and safety. While students read they would follow the characters' stories using 3-column notes focused on standard-based comprehension questions.

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

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

This teachers guide for Searching for Silverheels by Jeannie Mobley includes a prereading activity, discussion questions, and writing and research activities for after reading.

In this lesson, students will evaluate the model essay and begin to draft their own essays.

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.

Students will particiate in a Socratice Seminar to discuss the idea of non-conformity as a relative theme in the novel Stargirl. Students will refer to text annotations and class discussions (option: complete TPFASTT) to make contributions to the student led discussion.