A sixth grade boy lives with his mother. The mother maintains their livelihood with a blue collar job. In the story, William wants to find a cure for unhappiness that he sees in his mother and a man on the street. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this three week unit on the novel The Pearl, by John Steinbeck, students examine and discuss the characteristics of a novel, compare and contrast the novel to folk tales and short stories, write chapter summaries and essays, and conduct Internet research to prepare slideshow presentations on related topics including those reflecting cultural differences of the novel's characters and those issues involving the economic principle of supply and demand.

In this lesson, students create flowers to represent themselves and present them to the class.

In this lesson, students practice identifying the main idea in a reading passage by using a technique to eliminate unnecessary or irrelevant words.

The narrator of The White Umbrella is a Chinese American girl who struggles with feelings of embarrassment and longing to be like others. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Brian Aldiss describes a futuristic world in which machines are capable of thinking based on the tasks they have been designed to perform. One day the machines realize that the few remaining humans have died, leaving the machines to fend for themselves. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story with text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students use short reading passages to identify, explain, and discuss the author's purpose for writing.

After an overview of the events surrounding Paul Revere's famous ride, this lesson challenges students to think about the reasons for that fame. Using both primary and secondhand accounts, students compare the account of Revere's ride in Longfellow's famous poem with actual historical events, in order to answer the question: why does Revere's ride occupy such a prominent place in the American consciousness?

The wind and water are personified as two women talking about their children. Mrs. Wind brags about her children, which annoys Mrs. Water who drowns Mrs. Wind’s children when they come to her for a drink. As Mrs. Wind calls for her children, white feathers come to the top of the water, causing whitecaps. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a novel that engages middle school students in thought-provoking discussion, and provides practice in literary analysis skills. The three lessons in this unit all stress textual evidence to support observations and generalizations uncovering the novel's central character traits, symbols and themes.

This resource contains worksheets, projects, and activities for William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Explore the traditions and conventions of haiku and compare this classic form of Japanese poetry to a related genre of Japanese visual art.

“The Wreck of the Hesperus” is a narrative poem about an arrogant ship captain (skipper) who takes his daughter on an ill-fated voyage across a wintry sea. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this poem through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This lesson invites students to reconfigure Meg’s journey into a board game where, as in the novel itself, Meg’s progress is either thwarted or advanced by aspects of her emotional responses to situations, her changing sense of self, and her physical and intellectual experiences.

In this lesson, students will explore how myths provide explanations for nature and science. They will read and analyze the Native American myth "Giants and Mosquitoes." They will relate the myth to other creation myths and their own experiences. Afterwards, they will write their own original myth using the writing process.

In this lesson asks students to reflect on their writing process, and helps the teacher learn more about students' habits and techniques as writers. Students begin by reading and analyzing the poem "The Writer" by Richard Wilbur, particularly discussing the use of extended metaphor. Students then reflect on their own writing habits, compare themselves as writers to the writer in the poem, and brainstorm possible metaphors for themselves as writers.

In this lesson, students will use the steps of the writing process (brainstorming, drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing) to write original and, in small groups, perform their fables as skits. Students will also review the elements of a fable, such as theme, in order to create original written fables of their own.

In this lesson, students select a prose, poetry, or nonfiction excerpt from a book of their choice and share it by reading aloud to their classmates, who identify the genre and respond to related questions in their journals.

In this lesson, students make predictions about the storyline of a novel, then confirm and discuss those predictions as the story progresses.