This lesson uses creatures created from students' imaginations to teach hyperbole, simile, metaphor, and alliteration in association with creative writing.

This curriculum guide covers six works of Laurie Halse Anderson (Chains, Forge, Ashes, Fever 1793, Independent Dames: What You Never Knew About the Women and Girls of the American Revolution, and Thank You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving), and contains discussion prompts, key vocabulary terms, and ideas for assignments and activities related to each book.

Students will view a reality television episode and read a news article related to reality television. Then students will complete a graphic organizer to create an argument for or against children participating in reality television. Students will apply supportive details for writing a persuasive paragraph.

The following unit incorporates multimedia and classroom activities to encourage students to explore and interact with poetry by first writing letters to important historical poets as practice for writing letters to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors, a group that represents poetry in America at its best.

E-book readers, or digital readers, are devices that can host thousands of electronic books and allows readers to interact with digital texts through the use of e-book tools and features. In this lesson, students will read e-books and use digital tools (dictionaries and notes) to support their development of vocabulary. Specifically, students will assume roles of “word detectives” as they look up words in digital dictionaries and use other strategies to identify the meaning of vocabulary words.

This interactive unit encourages students to evaluate the effect of the inclusion of figurative langauge in Amy Tan's nonfiction narrative essay Fish Cheeks paired with the poem Face It by Janet Wong. This lesson will assist students in understanding the power of language. Students will be compelled to write by the conclusion of this lesson.

Students will read the story, Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold and compare thier own lives with that of a girl in a tenement builidng in New York City. Through reading the story, students will better understand the hopes and dreams of the less fortunate.

Student will predict ideas or events that may take place in the text, give rationale for predictions, confirm and discuss predictions as the story progresses.

Students will watch introductory videos about paratroopers in WWII and how parachutes work, and be challenged to design, create, and improve, an original paratrooper with specific limited supplies.

A guideline for teachers to compare the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce and discuss how their narration choices affect the piece and the reader.

In this lesson students will identify the effective use of imagery and practice analyzing and creating imagery in particular selections.

After reading the novel, “The Outsiders”, by S.E. Hinton, students will follow the engineering design process to build  fire truck vehicles that will transport water from a starting line, 20 feet, to a finish line to put the “fire” out.  The students' fire trucks will be powered by a Sphero robot and driven using the Sphero app. Students will work in groups of 3-4.  Students will be supplied with a 3 oz cup to represent a fire bucket and a 16 oz cup to represent the fire.  The cup that represents fire will have a high water mark drawn on it and students must fill their cup to the mark to successfully complete the challenge.

This project applies the concepts of Friction, Gravity, Newton's Laws, Potential and Kinetic Energy, Speed, Distance vs. Time Graphs, and integrates them into a culminating project. Students work in pairs to create a marble run using basic classroom supplies and a standard tri-fold board. The goal is to create a marble run that takes as long as possible for the marble to complete without getting stuck. The project includes a data analysis section and a content questions component. There is also a scoring rubric included. The standards that this project covers can be found on the final page of the document. No special materials or tools are necessary.

 Students are tasked with moving a 20 gram (or other low denomination) weight a distance of one meter using a “Sphero*” remote controlled robot.  Students use available materials to design and build a structure that will allow the sphero to push or pull the weight, while allowing for factors such as friction, direction, and gravity.   *Note: Although students can issue specific commands in the Sphero software, this activity only requires that they be able to “drive” the Sphero, thus providing the force to move the weight. 

This resource includes one poem, with an accompanying link to the poem being read aloud, and nine text-dependent questions (including one optional constructed-response prompt for students), and explanatory information for teachers regarding alignment to the CCSS.

This lesson capitalizes on a student's love of jokes to understand how word context and inference are used in everyday language to create humor.

This mini-unit is a designed for a middle school environment, teaching students about having a growth mindset and not a fixed mindset. The unit discusses the difference between a growth and a fixed mindset and allows students to explore these ideas through a variety of individual, partner, and group activities. Students will take a self-assessment on their current mindset at the beginning and the end of the unit, reflecting on their changing or lack there of in overall mindset.

In this lesson, students select and research a real-life hero. They then prepare short lectures for their classmates based upon the research they gain from a variety of primary and secondary sources.

This webpage contains theme-based discussion prompts for each vignette in The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, as well as a selection of follow-up activities.