This resource provides a lesson designed to help students understand the use of satire and the myriad technicques that authors may use to add it to their writing. Students use the film Shrek to examine the four techniques of exaggeration, incongruity, reversal and parody. Students prove their understanding by using satire to rewrite a fairly tale.

Students are introduced to the idea of "The Simpsons" as satire by comparing what they did on a typical day to the things the Simpsons do in the opening sequence of the show. Students use the character profiles on the Simpsons website to analyze six characters, identifying satirical details that reveal the comment/criticism being made about society through the characters. Finally, students use a graphic organizer to record and analyze specific examples of satire as they watch a full episode.

Students read two math-related books used in the lesson to give real-world contexts to the strategy of grouping objects to be counted. Students, then, explore their school and home environments to find and represent their own examples of sets. In the culminating activity, students create pages for a collaborative class book of sets.

In this lesson, students are encouraged to explore the idea of memory in both large- and small-group settings. Students access their own life experiences and then discuss family stories they have heard. After choosing a family member to interview, students create questions, interview their relative, and write a personal narrative that describes not only the answers to their questions but their own reactions to these responses. These narratives are peer reviewed and can be published as a class magazine or a website.

This resource includes a lesson plan designed to assist learners with the concepts of freedom, justice, discrimination and the American Dream. Students will examine the "I Have a Dream Speech" and select powerful words and themes from the text and arrange them into original diamante poems.

This follow-up assignment to the reading of Chaucer's General Prologue gives students the opportunity to work in a collaborative setting with technology while explicating text and researching historical infromation. Aditionally students will work as a team to create group wikis.

In this lesson the students will be using a variety of skills to analyze fiction and expository texts. This combines the reading of detective fiction with written expository analysis in the form of a Detective’s Handbook. Each student reads a detective mystery, and the class watches and analyzes Murder She Purred to establish a collective example.

August Wilson's play "The Piano Lesson" readily invites students to ask a number of questions--big and small--about the characters, setting, conflict, and symbols in the work. After reading the first act students learn how to create effective discussion questions and then put them to use in student-led seminars after act one and again at the end of the play.

In the multi-day lesson, students will distinguish facts about worms from fictional details by listening to and reading Diary of a Worm by Doreen Cronin. Students will have the opportunity to explore the illustrations, fictional details, nonfiction details, and captions and speech bubbles within the text. In this way, students are given concrete strategies that they can use to help differentiate narrative and informational elements in other books they read.

Students work together in small groups to read, discuss, and analyze fairy tales. After compiling a list of common elements, students collaborate on their own original fairy tales—based on events from their own lives or the lives of someone they know. Each student decides what kind of experience to write about, composes and revises a fairy tale, and then presents their story to the rest of the class.

This resource includes a lesson that requires students to read a short memoir prior to writing a memoir for a family member. Students are tasked with interviewing the family member prior to formulating their memoir, which may take the forms of photographic collages, image panels, a painting, a video, musical composition, sculpture or any other creative method. This lesson was designed to accompany the PBS documentary, The Mystery of Love. Links are provided to the PBS website for the documentary.

In this lesson, students first write a message to their families explaining what they have learned about a topic. Next, they write a message comparing what they know to new information that they are just learning. Finally, they write a message saying how they feel about something they encountered in class, such as a favorite character in a book.

Students will read books about families and make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections using those books. Students gain a deeper understanding of a text when they make authentic connections. Beginning with a read-aloud of Donald Crews' "Bigmama's", the instructor introduces and models the strategy of making connections. Read-alouds of "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats and "The Relatives Came" by Cynthia Rylant are followed by activities that help students learn to apply each type of text connection when responding to texts. After sharing and discussing connections in a Think-Pair-Share activity, students plan and write a piece describing a personal connection to one of the texts.

In this lesson, students analyze and discuss familiar superheroes and super-villains to expand their understanding of character types and conventions. Then students consider social issues that confront their everyday reality and respond by incorporating those issues into the creation of their own superheroes or super-villains as well as the settings the superheroes or super-villains operate in.

This lesson asks students to write a profile of a classmate, with a particular focus on a talent, interest, or passion of that classmate. As an introduction to the feature article, students compare the characteristics of a hard news story to those of a feature story. They then practice writing about the same event in the two different styles.

Learning from past mistakes can help prevent one from repeating those mistakes. The purpose of this lesson is to educate students about the past and prepare them to become concerned and active students. Students study the experience of European Jewish citizens during the Holocaust. Through a reading of a novel set during the Holocaust period, students gain a better understanding of the social injustices and atrocities that occurred. Students then research the experience of the Cherokees during the Trail of Tears and the Japanese Americans during World War II. To compare these three events, students use an online Venn diagram tool. Students write about their reactions to these events in journals and discuss them during class. Critical thinking is encouraged to allow students to come to their own conclusions about these events.

It's raining cats and dogs! Students explore figurative language through read-alouds, teacher modeling, and student-centered activities, further developing their understanding of the literal versus the metaphorical translations of idioms.

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 lesson, students will expand the concept of love poems to move beyond romantic love to explore other kinds of love, particularly the love within a family. Students work in small groups to read and analyze poems that expand the definition of love poetry. They write or select a personal memoir about love, particularly focusing on love within a family. Finally, they compose and peer review found poems based on the memoir.

Science fiction has the potential to spark lively discussions while inviting students to extrapolate from their own working knowledge of scientific principles. They first define the science fiction genre and then read and discuss science fiction texts. Next, they conduct research to find science facts that support or dispute the science included in the plot of the science fiction book they read. Students then revisit their definition of the genre and revise based on their reading. Finally, students complete a project that examines the science fiction genre in relation to real-world science concepts and topics.