Students analyze characters by noting the ways in which defining moments shape their personalities in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Students will chart changes, note the “direction” of their characters, support their conclusions with textual evidence, and present their findings.

Students read Raymond Carver’s short story "A Small, Good Thing," focusing on characterization in order to develop one of the static characters—the hit-and-run driver who causes Scotty’s death—more fully. Students use a literary graphic organizer to analyze the three major characters. They compare the story to an older version titled "The Bath." Finally, they create an original anecdote involving the driver, share their stories, and respond to each other's writing.

Some people question whether Shakespeare really wrote the works that bear his name – or whether he even existed at all. Could it be true that the greatest writer in the English language was as fictional as his plays? This four-minute video shows how a linguistic tool called stylometry might shed light on the answer.

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.

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.

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 resource provides a lesson designed to help students understand the use of satire and the myriad technicques that authors may use to add it to their writing. Students use the film Shrek to examine the four techniques of exaggeration, incongruity, reversal and parody. Students prove their understanding by using satire to rewrite a fairly tale.

This follow-up assignment to the reading of Chaucer's General Prologue gives students the opportunity to work in a collaborative setting with technology while explicating text and researching historical infromation. Aditionally students will work as a team to create group wikis.

August Wilson's play "The Piano Lesson" readily invites students to ask a number of questions--big and small--about the characters, setting, conflict, and symbols in the work. After reading the first act students learn how to create effective discussion questions and then put them to use in student-led seminars after act one and again at the end of the play.

The Frayer Model is a strategy that uses a graphic organizer for vocabulary building. This technique requires students to (1) define the target vocabulary words or concepts, and (2) apply this information by generating examples and non-examples. This information is placed on a chart that is divided into four sections to provide a visual representation for students.

Students are introduced to Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" by reading "The Butter Battle Book" by Dr. Seuss. After reading the picture book, students discuss the historical allusions as a class and identify its main satirical theme. Students then work in small groups to find additional background information and present it to the class. They chart details from the book and link each one to the historical information they have discovered. Students then repeat this process with "Gulliver's Travels," eventually discovering the overall message that the text communicates about society.

Students read about what it"™s like to be a Muslim teenager growing up in America at this moment, then consider ideas for countering stereotypes and Islamophobia. Lessons include guided informational readings, research and writing suggestions, videos, and resources to continue the discussion.

This lesson seeks to sensitize students to the complex nature of revenge as it is portrayed in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Students learn how the play interprets Elizabethan attitudes towards revenge as reflected in the structure of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Students will analyze the use of language and actions to motivate the avengers in the play; recognize Elizabethan theatrical conventions and their impact; and compare the text with a modern film interpretation.

In the TED Ed lesson focused on language, students will explore the history of English and why semantically equal phrases can evoke very different images. Discussion questions and additional resources are linked in the sidebar.

This lesson alerts students to the fallacies that surround them every day. In this lesson, students deconstruct fallacious images and messages in advertisements and demonstrate their understanding of the fallacies through multimedia presentations.

This lesson provides an introduction to the language and poetics of the epic poem, "Beowulf." Although students read "Beowulf" in translation, they will be introduced to the five characters in the Old English alphabet no longer used. Students will translate a phrase from the Old English, listen to a passage read in Old English, then learn about poetic devices important in "Beowulf." Finally, students will compare the use of alliteration in Auden's poem, "The Age of Anxiety" to the alliteration and meter used in "Beowulf."

In this three-part lesson on the inner chapters of "The Grapes of Wrath" students will first determine the function of Steinbeck's opening chapter then explore the relationship between the inner chapters and the Joad narrative chapters throughout the novel. Students will view two documentaries along the way as well as read two relevant articles in order to draw their own conclusions about the purpose of this novel's inner chapters.

This lesson offers a series of activities that allow students to explore and interact with poetry by writing letters to poets.

Although American colonists complained bitterly about British taxation policy, it was not until 1775 that they decided to take up arms against the king. What changed? The Battles of Lexington and Concord. The killing of Americans by British troops transformed a largely peaceful resistance into an armed rebellion. In this lesson students will read three primary sources that illustrate this shift, including a farmer's diary, a broadside, and a sermon. Students will perform close readings and answer a series of text-dependent questions.