From the Standford University Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, this lesson, Love and Faith, introduces students to the music and poetry of the modern African American Freedom Struggle and challenges them to create their own creative works.

In this lesson and resource, students use charts and graphs to determine the main idea in a visual literacy exercise.

Students develop and present an evidence-based argument about a change they would like to bring about at their school to make it a healthier place for all students. In this interactive lesson designed for both full-class and individual or small-group work, students examine a similar effort, chronicled in BASIC BLACK: Youth Fighting Fat, in which a group of concerned Boston teens seeks to address the problem of obesity in their community.

In this lesson, a three-pronged approach is used to help students create mental images while reading. The first approach develops schemata (prior knowledge) and visual awareness (the understanding and interpretation of visual images) by introducing content-related picture books and having students respond to the illustrations using a series of question prompts. The next approach capitalizes on existing visual comprehension using a strategy called Watch-Read-Watch-Read (W-R-W-R), where video clips build background knowledge and assist students in developing "memory pegs" as they read. Finally, students use a strategy similar to the think-aloud approach, creating drawings to illustrate and understand relevant information gleaned from print.

Students will be able to read a grade level text,  the novel "The Outsiders". As they read they will have to cite information, make inferences and connections, summarize, compare different mediums (book and movie) and learn about the author and how her experiences shaped the novel. Students will also get to write persuasively and creatively during this unit.

In this lesson students study Alexander Gardner's photograph of Lincoln taken a little over two months before his death. They look for clues to Lincoln's personality and mood, read a short biography, write a poem describing what they learned about Lincoln, and create an artwork showing his character. They also learn about Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner and 19th century photographic processes.

This lesson plan, The Power of Freedom, focuses on Dr. Martin Luther King’s most well-known and frequently taught classic works, like “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream.” Students read and discuss the themes in both works and connect to events in their lives today.

The students will read and reread the passage closely, and focusing their reading through either a series of questions and discussion about the text or the structured journal approach outlined here, students will come away with a working knowledge of the digestive system, its parts, and how they function together.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 7th Grade English Language Arts.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 7th Grade ELA. 

Students will use music lyrics to identify vocabulary, imagery, analysis, and interpret poetry. Students will work collaboratively to develop the meaning of poetry. Specifcally, this lesson highlights Langston Hughes' poetry and the Harlem Renaissance.

In this lesson, students will become familiar with analyzing events and ideas using primary and secondary sources. Tasks involve evaluating text for author’s point of view; determining central ideas, reviewing information for cause and effect relationships, as well as distinguishing fact from opinion using political cartoons.

In this lesson, students read an article that introduces students to the idea that most of the solar system is made up of empty space and presents data about the relative size and distance of objects in the solar system. As they read, students will consider how scientists use models to represent the vastness of the solar system.

This lesson from the New York Times offers suggestions for making TheTimes a low-stress part of your classroom routine, followed by literacy strategies to help address the Standards before, during, and after reading Times content with your students.

Suggestions for making TheTimes a low-stress part of your classroom routine, followed by literacy strategies to help address the Standards before, during, and after reading Times content with your students.

In this unit from the Standford University The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute students develop a broader understanding of the struggle for equality from 1868 to the present by exploring first-person narratives from a diverse group of Americans. Beginning with a study of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, students determine the criteria for identifying an event as historically significant. Students then explore the impact of the struggle for equality by interviewing people in their community and utilizing resources such as Toni Morrison’s Remember: The Journey to School Integration, Voices of Civil Rights, a national oral history project by the Library of Congress, and StoryCorps, an independent non-profit project that focuses on oral history collections of individuals’ life experiences.

This cross-curricular ELA/science module consists of three units. In Unit 1, students build background knowledge about the central role that water plays in all life. In Unit 2, students use the US Environmental Protection Agency My WATERS Mapper to explore major US watersheds and the USGS National Water Information System to examine their local watershed. Unit 3 provides scaffolding toward students' summative writing assessment.

This resource is a collection of discussion questions to supplement the non-fiction war verterans' account, We Were There by Yvonne Latty.

In this lesson geared for ELL or regular education students, the students will develop an understanding of their own experiences from their native home and relate them to the text. This text helps trigger memories, as well as gives students appropritate examples of past tense uses. Students can explore the story further by researching the author before reading and sharing experiences in a similar format.

This lesson, Young People Working for Justice, focuses on Dr. Martin Luther King and on the role of youth during the modern African American Freedom Struggle. The activities encourage students to envision their role in creating a just world.