In this speech, Rudolfo Anaya celebrates the purchase of the 1 millionth library volume by the University of New Mexico. He begins by describing how as a child on summer evenings he sat under the stars and listened to the stories of los viejitos, the old ones. For Anaya the million volumes in the university’s library represent freedom because preserving access to ideas leads to the preservation and ultimately the regeneration of our cultural ideals. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students will dissect a Times column about the leadership styles of former Vice President (and Nobel Laureate) Al Gore and President George W. Bush and then write their own opinion editorial on presidential leadership.

Students work with primary documents and latter-day photographs to recapture the experience of traveling on the Oregon Trail.

This resource includes two nonfiction texts, a link to a video, and 17 text-dependent questions (including one optional constructed-response prompt for students). Also includes explanatory information for teachers regarding alignment to the CCSS.

The Paragraph Shrinking strategy allows each student to take turns reading, pausing, and summarizing the main points of each paragraph. Students provide each other with feedback as a way to monitor comprehension.

In this activity students perform a role play of immigrant mothers and daughters arguing over who should get to keep the daughter's wages. This activity is used to teach with the film Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl, but can be completed without the film.

In this lesson students study Alexander Gardner's photograph of Lincoln taken a little over two months before his death. They look for clues to Lincoln's personality and mood, read a short biography, write a poem describing what they learned about Lincoln, and create an artwork showing his character. They also learn about Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner and 19th century photographic processes.

A nonfiction, Common Core aligned reading passage, this handout contains textual analysis and inference questions along with central idea skills.

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.

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?

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.

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.

A nonfiction, Common Core aligned reading passage, this handout contains textual analysis and inference questions along with central idea skills.

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

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.

The students will read and reread the passage closely, and focusing their reading through either a series of questions and discussion about the text or the structured journal approach outlined here, students will come away with a working knowledge of the digestive system, its parts, and how they function together.

In this lesson, students compare how both George and Martha Washington felt about General Washington becoming the first President of the United States. Students should complete the George Washington's Letter to Henry Knox about the Presidency and Martha Washington's Letter about the Presidency worksheets prior to beginning this activity.

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

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.

In this lesson and resource, students use primary sources to practice analysis of primary sources.