Well known for addressing social issues in the world through her poetry, Maya Angelou’s moving poems serve to teach historical topics in this lesson. To understand the world that surrounded her, students practice their visual literacy skills as they first examine photographs from the Library of Congress. These primary sources illustrate some of the events that affected her life and thus her writing. Next students research these events in order to create trading cards using the ReadWriteThink Trading Card App or Trading Card Creator Student Interactive. While reading Angelou’s poems, students share the trading cards to better understand the background for her writing.

Students develop a working definition of transcendentalism by answering and discussing a series a questions about their own individualism and relationship to nature. Over the next few sessions, students read and discuss excerpts from Emerson’s “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” and Thoreau’s Walden. They use a graphic organizer to summarize the characteristics of transcendental thought as they read. Students then examine modern comic strips and songs to find evidence of transcendental thought. They gather additional examples on their own to share with the class. Finally, students complete the chart showing specific examples of transcendental thought from a variety of multimodal genres.

Students will explore the black-white racial divide in America by examining both Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy and the context of three contemporary events in American social politics - the election of Barak Obama, the Gates-Crowley incident, and the Jena Six case.

Through haiku, students learn to slow down and become mindful of their natural surroundings, enabling them to capture experiences vividly through description. In this unit, students read and listen to examples of haiku, and learn about the history and structure behind this Japanese poetic form. They engage in both outdoor and classroom activities that encourage mindfulness and the exploration of sensory imagery. After writing, illustrating, and pairing their haiku with instrumental music, students collaborate with classmates in creating movements to their poems. The final project is a student compilation of choreographed haiku performances put to movement and music.

In this lesson students use art and poetry to explore and understand the major characteristics of the Romantic period. After learning about the Romantic period students deepen their understanding through an evaluation of William Wordsworth's definition of poetry. Students then complete an explication of a painting from the Romantic period. Finally, students complete a literary analysis of a Wordsworth poem followed by an essay showing their understanding of Romanticism.

In this lesson, students create text sets and use them to practice three strategies for reading for information. Students select a topic they want to explore and work in small groups to compile a set of texts related to their topic.

This lesson uses Jane Addams Award-winning books to explore author's voice and style. The Jane Addams Book Awards are given to children's books that effectively promote the cause of peace, social justice, world community, and the equality of the sexes and all races. After reading and examining The Yellow Star: The Legend of King Christian X of Denmark by Carmen Agra Deedy, a Jane Addams Honor Book in 2001, students choose another Jane Addams Award-winning book for personal investigation of author's voice. This lesson is designed for students in grades 6 to 8, but can be adapted for other grade bands as well.

Students will learn about careers and more as they research a variety of occupations the world has to offer. In this multisession lesson, students begin with a discussion of blogs and the concept of careers. Students choose careers that interest them or that they want to pursue, use online resources to research career options.

In this lesson students explore expository texts about natural disasters that focus on cause-and-effect relationships. As a class students record their understandings in a graphic organizer. Students then work in small groups and write paragraphs outlining the cause-and-effect relationships they have found.

Change is an inevitable part of life that challenges many young adults. Understanding and accepting change are key components in career and future planning. In this lesson, students explore the theme of change through allegory and poetry by reading an example of literary allegory and creating their own pictorial allegories. Students first define allegory and complete a pictorial allegory or "me tree" that displays phrases describing their interests, trails, and dreams on outlines of their hands. Next, they read and discuss a text, such as Shel Silverstein’s, The Giving Tree or Sandy Stryker's Tonia the Tree that addresses change, and then review basic literary concepts as they complete a literary elements map and plot diagram. Finally, students further explore change, and what it means to them, as they write diamante poems related to the theme of change.

In this lesson, students learn to identify and analyze the compare and contrast text structure within expository texts.

This lesson focuses on identifying and analyzing the compare and contrast text structure within expository texts. First, students are introduced to the terms compare and contrast and asked to find similarities and differences between two common items. Next, students work in small groups to identify texts that are comparing and contrasting information.

This resource provides a lesson that tasks high school students with assisting elementary level students to gain a deeper understanding of the expeditions of Lewis and Clark. The lesson is framed around the work, How We Crossed the West. As a culminating activity, the elementary students will produce a festival to prove what they have learned to the high school students.

This resource provides a lesson wherein students will seek to apply the B-D-A (before-during-after) reading comprehension strategy while they examine resources pertaining to disabilities.

Katherine Paterson’s novel Bridge to Terabithia follows the relationship of fifth graders, Jess Aarons and Leslie Burke, as they meet and become friends. The book can be used as a means for students to understand and explore the value of friendship. In this lesson, which is most appropriate for use in fourth- through sixth-grade classrooms, students make predictions about the book and its main characters, complete character studies as part of an in-depth look at Jess and Leslie’s friendship, and relate the characters’ experiences to their own as they define friendship and identify ways to make and keep friends.

All Quiet on the Western Front ends with a startling and ironic conclusion. This ending introduces students to situational irony. After discussing the definition and several examples of situational irony, students explore the novel’s concluding passage. Students next choose a possible alternate ending for the book that could still be an example of situational irony. They then retitle the book and rewrite its ending, maintaining the original ironic tone and weaving their new title into the ending as Remarque does. Finally, students design new, symbolic covers for the book, which feature their new titles.

This lesson will help students identify the various uses of language and understand their appropriateness within context. Students participate in journal writing as well as writing literacy narratives describing multiple uses of language. The lesson is designed to accompany a ready of "Mother Tongue"; however, the lesson may be used in conjunction with a study of other writings in English by authors who write or speak English as a second language.

In the essay “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan explains that she “began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with.” How these “different Englishes” or even a language other than English contribute to identity is a crucial issue for adolescents.
In this lesson, students explore this issue by brainstorming the different languages they use in speaking and writing, and when and where these languages are appropriate. They write in their journals about a time when someone made an assumption about them based on their use of language, and share their writing with the class. Students then read and discuss Amy Tan's essay “Mother Tongue.” Finally, they write a literacy narrative describing two different languages they use and when and where they use these languages.

This resource provides a lesson designed to assist students with identifying the skills they use to read and comprehend with a small group. Afterwards, learners with use some of those strategies to read online, informational texts. As a culminating activty, students will report their discoveries through discussion pertaining to the differences in reading physical and online texts and the strategies they used.

This lesson helps students understand copyright, fair use, and plagiarism by focusing on why students should avoid plagiarism and exploring strategies that respect copyright and fair use. The lesson includes three parts, each framed by a KWL chart.