This three week lesson provides instruction in the basic elements of literature by reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Students are also provided the opportunity to understand how their choices can change their attitudes and behavior through a reading of the novel and a series of writing assignments.

In this activity, students will divide into two teams to conduct a mock trial based on The Ransom of Redchief by O. Henry.

The main character is unhappy about her family’s move to Cincinnati and spends most of her time in her room, miserable. Then one day, she goes grocery shopping for her parents and falls in love with the bag boy. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

A Learning Plan is an instructional resource used to record students' proficiency of a standard and gives students' choice of how they will learn the content. The use of this resource also enables students to learn at their own pace. The data will inform the teacher whether or not a student needs more direct instruction. Students who master the standard may be allowed to complete enrichment activities connected to the standard or advance to a new standard.This resource was developed as part of a professional learning opportunity funded by the NCDPI Digital Learning Initiative Planning Grant.

In this lesson, students use the Cornell notes tool to do close reading of informational text.

This teacher's guide for The Dark Side of Nowhere by Neal Shusterman contains a summary of the text, discussion questions, activities, and research 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.

A group of discussion questions for Ishmael Beah's memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

This resource contains a set of discussion questions for The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

This teacher's guide for Doll Bones by Holly Black contains a prereading activity, discussion questions, and postreading assignments.

Double-Entry Journaling improves students' comprehension, vocabulary, and content retention. This interactive strategy activates prior knowledge and present feelings, and promotes collaborative learning. It fosters the connection between reading and writing as students are able to "reply" to the author or speaker as they write their responses. The technique offers flexibility in that teachers can use any form of written text, read alouds, or listenings that are assigned in class.

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

This story is set in a Tennessee peach orchard on the night before the Civil War battle of Shiloh. A young drummer briefly considers staying behind when the fighting begins. Then a man walks by and stops to talk, and the boy discovers that this man is his general. From their discussion, the boy arrives at a new understanding about his role in the battle to come. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, the students will get practice in reading and writing habits that they have been working with throughout the curriculum, in this case using poetry.

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. 

 Small groups  students will select a picture book containing an academic standard taught to elementary age students. The students will research the central idea to collect important points of the idea. Students will film a documentary of the central idea to be shared with local elementary school students.  

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 engage in a close reading of Hopper's painting and an Edward Hirsch poem to explore the types of emotion generated by each work in the viewer or reader, and how the painter and poet each achieved these responses.