Students learn about life in Babylonia through the lens of Hammurabi's Code. This lesson is designed to extend world history curricula on Mesopotamia and to give students a more in-depth view of life in Babylonia during the time of Hammurabi.

This lesson examines the characteristics of Greek heroes and leads students to recognize references to Greek mythological heroes found in literature and culture today. Students will present analyses of heroes by defending their favorites in a slideshow presentation nominatting them for selection to a Heroes' Hall of Fame.

The focus of this lesson is on the use of hieroglyphs as a form of communication, record keeping, and as a means for preserving and passing down history. Students will learn basic information about the alphabet, common Egyptian words, and how to read hieroglyphic messages. Students will also practice using hieroglyphs to create messages of their own.

Students conduct Web searches on open-ended questions and draw on their experiences to develop guides to searching effectively and finding reliable information online.

Students will read background information, a passage, information, vocabulary words, and vocabulary in context. Students will write answers to questions, quotations to support a main idea, and a response to a prompt. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.

Students will read a description of and passage from L. Frank Baum's work, characters' descriptions, questions, vocabulary, definitions, text excerpts, and a writing prompt. Students will write short answers, quotations to support a main idea, and an essay. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.

This resource supports English language development for English language learners. In this lesson plan, students analyze visual and textual primary sources to determine the extent to which African-Americans freed themselves versus the extent to which Abraham Lincoln ended slavery. The site includes links to primary source documents (including one from North Carolina), analysis worksheets for each document, and graphic organizers to support the lesson. The lesson includes speaking, listening, reading, and writing activities.

In this activity students read short excerpts of documents that show how the expectations of women, African Americans, and working white men were raised by the rhetoric of liberty during the American Revolution. Students write petitions to the Continental Congress from one of the three group's perspectives, explaining how their group responded to the Revolution and outlining how their group should be treated under the new Constitution. This activity includes multiple learning supports that can help ESL/ELL students, special education students, or low readers.

Students will explore the personalities of the Revolutionary War's Patriots and Loyalists by participating in a character role play. The lesson will culminate with students researching and writing a character sketch of a key Revolutionary figure of their choice and participating in a Colonial Town Hall & Debate.

In this lesson, students will use the individual experience of Mary McLeod Bethune to analyze choice, its affects on social equality, and impact on their own life experiences.

In this lesson students examine how imagery is used to represent ideas, themes, periods of history, and make cultural connections to poem, "Still I Rise." Students will reflect through written expression how resiliency is in their lives, school, and community.

This lesson gives students the opportunity to examine opinion editorials and write their own on school issues. After reading and listening to opinion pieces, students identify strong examples of persuasion and record them on a graphic organizer. Small groups then brainstorm issues in the school that they believe deserve action plans. Each group uses graphic organizers to explore its issue. The group then constructs a letter on that issue. The letter is then edited for grammar and content, typed on a word processor, printed, and delivered to the school principal.

This tool helps students break down their argument into reasons and supporting details, which will help them write their letter.

In this lesson, students explore environmental issues that are relevant to their own lives, self-select topics, and gather information to write persuasive essays. Students participate in peer conferences to aid in the revision process and evaluate their essays through self-assessment. Although this lesson focuses on the environment as a broad topic, many other topics can be easily substituted for reinforcement of persuasive writing.

Students will watch and discuss video clips that show how two men in Chile coped with being prisoners in concentration camps during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Each student will then create a non-fiction picture book that tells the story of one of these men and provides historical context.

Speech writing is a rhetorical art and provides the content for these scaffolded lessons that support the increased cognitive rigor of literacy standards with presidential writings.

In this lesson, students read informational pieces about whether or not schools should teach cursive writing. They will evaluate the arguments presented and then choose a side of the issue. Finally, they will write their own arguments expressing their points of view.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 6th Grade Math.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 8th Grade ELA. 

Students examine the state of the print newspaper industry, then debate its future.