This activity emphasizes the importance of teaching reading and writing strategies for students to use with informational text.

This resource includes informational paried passage mini-assessment that includes two articles and one accompanying recording, thirteen text-dependent questions (including one optional constructed-response prompt for students), and explanatory information for teachers regarding alignment to the CCSS. Articles included are “High Schools Starting Later to Help Sleepy Teens,” by Michelle Trudeau and “High schools will keep starting too early. Here’s why" by Dan Weissman.

In this lesson students analyze comics for samples of logical, emotional, and ethical appeal (ethos, logos, pathos). Students then write a paragraph for each selected comic strip explaining how the comic strip represents the use of each rhetorical appeal.

This lesson and resource uses headline articles to help students read effectively by distilling main ideas from an informational text.

In this lesson and resource, students evaluate debate claims and examine their own reasoning.

Students will read a text and write to justify their evaluation of the claims. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.

In this lesson, students will complete a Tracing an Argument note catcher for both a text and a video.

In this lesson, students will analyze the model argument in order to better understand how to craft their own successfully.

In this lesson, students will focus on understanding main idea and supporting details by answering text dependent questions from an excerpt called "Beyond the Brain."

In this lesson, students will read an argument text which links neuroscience and digital media. Students will focus on a yes/no debate on the question, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

In this lesson and resource, students learn what a thesis statement is and how it relates to an informational reading.

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.

Students work together to analyze an orally presented research study and provide a brief presentation on their findings to their classmates. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.

In this lesson, students will dissect a Times column about the leadership styles of former Vice President (and Nobel Laureate) Al Gore and President George W. Bush and then write their own opinion editorial on presidential leadership.

Students work with primary documents and latter-day photographs to recapture the experience of traveling on the Oregon Trail.

Students to the ways in which packaging is designed to attract kids. The class begins with a discussion about packaging and how the design, promotions and product placement all contribute to make a product attractive to consumers. In a series of individual and group activities, students compare similar food products based on packaging and on taste. An optional field trip to a grocery store in suggested to see how packaging and placement affect consumer choices.

Students discuss their experiences playing free online games and then learn the costs of these "free" games in the form of paying with money sharing personal information or providing attention to advertising or branded content. Students then learn a variety of techniques for mitigating the risks and drawbacks of online games and communicate their learning by describing one of these techniques in video-game terms.

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.

In this lesson and resource, students use a research platform to kick off a long-term class project on an issue relevant to the community.

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.