An absentee father takes his daughter on a hunting trip. The experience leads them to discover that that they are not strangers after all. They both learn that as you get to know someone you learn about yourself as well. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

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 lesson was designed to help students gain social studies/history content knowledge by using textual evidence to answer text-dependent questions.

Students will be taught the "drill skill and kill" method to be used on grammar concepts within an argumentative paper.

As a way to support teachers with English Language Arts (ELA) instruction during the pandemic, the NCDPI ELA team created choice boards featuring standards-aligned ELA activities.The intended purpose of these choice boards is to provide a way for students to continue standards-based learning while schools are closed. Each activity can be adapted and modified to be completed with or without the use of digital tools. Many activities can also be repeated with different texts. These standards-based activities are meant to be a low-stress approach to reinforcing and enriching the skills learned during the 2019-2020 school year. The choice boards are to be used flexibly by teachers, parents, and students in order to meet the unique needs of each learner.Exploration activities are provided for a more self-directed or guided approach to independent learning for students. These activities and sites should be used as a way to explore concepts, topics, skills, and social and emotional competencies that interest the learner. 

Echo is a nymph that likes to gossip so a spell is cast upon her to only reiterate things that she has heard. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Elizabeth I is the biography of Queen Elizabeth who reigned in England for 45 years from 1558 to 1603. Milton Meltzer chronologically highlights her birth into parliament rule, her historical influence on England’s political system and her untimely death that brought the end to a dynasty. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this history through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This lesson leads students through an exploration of age-appropriate texts of various formats that are in their own ways revisionist fairy tales. After reading the stories Ella Enchanted and The Courageous Princess, students write journal entries on which of the two stories' heroines they’d most like to be. Next they read the poem "Grethel" and then compare and contrast all three female leads. Then students choose one of the texts and write their own revisions by turning the poem or book into another form. Finally, students share their work and assess their own writing using a class-created rubric.

In this lesson, students read Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in conjunction with Nikki Giovanni's poem "The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr." in order to better understand the speech and the impact it had both on observers like Giovanni during the Civil Rights Movement and on Americans today. After researching and writing quiz questions about the vocabulary and content of King's speech, students practice it orally before performing it readers' theater-style in front of an audience. Students synthesize their learning by writing reflections exploring various questions about King's dream in today's society, Nikki Giovanni's response, and ways to promote social change.

In this unit, students examine story elements and vocabulary associated with mystery stories through Directed Learning–Thinking Activities and then track these features as they read mystery books from the school or classroom library. Several activities at the Millennium Mystery Madness website, plus a story map project, add to their understanding and appreciation of the mystery genre. Students plan their own original mystery stories with the help of the interactive Mystery Cube, peer edit and revise their stories, and publish them online.

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.

A short video on locating words in the dictionary that students are unable to spell.

A short video on locating words in the dictionary that students are unable to spell.

This lesson provides hands-on differentiated instruction by guiding students to search for the literal definitions of figurative language using the Internet. It also guides students in understanding figurative meanings through the use of context clues and making inferences.

In this online activity, students flip two chips to mix and match four word parts and make four words. Students then insert the four words into a paragraph, using context clues to determine where each word belongs. After each exercise, students can print their work to check whether they placed the four words in the paragraph correctly.

This interactive lesson allows students the opportunity to fill in the blanks of a story with words created through a virtual flip of a chip. Students will use chips as tools for showing different affixes and roots that can be joined together to create words. The created words are inserted in a paragraph according to context clues. Students can work in pairs to create their own set of chips and corresponding paragraph. Students then exchange their packets to see whether the context clues are stong enough to enable classmates to fill in the blanks correctly.

Adding one word at a time, students compile a list of words associated with a novel they have recently read, ranging from details about the plot to feelings about a character. Small groups of students then arrange the collected words into at least four categories using an online tool. Finally, students share their work by creating and presenting posters, which are discussed by the whole group. The discussion ranges from vocabulary and comprehension to literary analysis and reader response. Words from The Hobbit are used in the lesson as an example, but the lesson would work with any text students have read.

In this lesson, students compose found and parallel poems based on descriptive literary passages they have read. Students first select a passage and then pick out descriptive words, phrases and lines. They then arrange and format the excerpts to compose their own poems. Students create found poems (poems that are composed from words and phrases found in another text) as well as parallel poems (original poems that use the same line structures as another poem, but focus on a completely different topic.) This process of recasting the text they are reading in a different genre helps students become more insightful readers and develop creativity in thinking and writing. Since students are primarily identifying nouns and verbs for use in their poems, the lesson also provides a relevant opportunity for a grammar review of these two parts of speech.

In this lesson students do a close reading of “Learning to Read,” a poem by Francis Watkins Harper about an elderly former slave which conveys the value of literacy to blacks during and after slavery. The activities also prompt students to examine the nature of literacy in the 21st century and the value they put upon it.