A teacher's guide to Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Includes common core aligned pre-reading promts, discussion questions, post-reading promts and writing activities.
An interactive resource on writing business emails.
A TED video that provides suggestions and tips for how to use language to make your fiction really come alive.
In this interactive lesson students will learn the basics of how to write their own poem by matching words with one of the five senses, identifing how the senses are used in writing, writing a poem, and using details.
For this online interactive, students read the story and answer the questions by typing their response in the box. This activity increases students' reading fluency, comprehension, and analytical skills.
This lesson and resource uses headline articles to help students read effectively by distilling main ideas from an informational text.
In this reflective essay, Chief Dan George compares his native North American culture with that of white culture. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this essay through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.
This resource includes two poems, eleven text-dependent questions (including one optional constructed-response prompt for students), and explanatory information for teachers regarding alignment to the CCSS.
In this lesson, students read "The Watsons Go To Birmingham" by Christopher Paul Curtis, then submit critical reviews via the internet as a way to publish their personal responses to the novel.
These excerpts from Maya Angelou’s autobiography describe important points in her childhood. First Angelou describes the importance of her Grandmother’s store. Later, when she becomes withdrawn and unhappy, Mrs. Flowers takes an interest in her and encourages her to read aloud and share her thoughts. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this history through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.
Students will better understand the use of I, me, and other pronouns.
In this lesson, students apply their understanding of the point of view of a literary work and how it affects the story line through writing their own family position paragraphs.
Paraphrasing helps students make connections with prior knowledge, demonstrate comprehension, and remember what they have read. Through careful explanation and thorough modeling by the teacher in this lesson, students learn to use paraphrasing to monitor their comprehension and acquire new information. They also realize that if they cannot paraphrase after reading, they need to go back and reread to clarify information. In pairs, students engage in guided practice so that they can learn to use the strategy independently. Students will need prompting and encouragement to use this strategy after the initial instruction is completed. The lesson can be extended to help students prepare to write reports about particular topics.
Worksheets and activities with answer keys to help students of differing levels identify and/or determine the types of irony used in selected passages.
This PDF allows students to read passages, identify the text structure, and write information from the passage into the appropriate graphic organizer. The handout will serve as a great means of practice to remediate, enrich, or extended students? knowledge about various types of text structures found in informational text.
Powerpoint and worksheets with answer keys to help students identify and/or reveal theme in seleceted passages.
This lesson alerts students to the fallacies that surround them every day. In this lesson, students deconstruct fallacious images and messages in advertisements and demonstrate their understanding of the fallacies through multimedia presentations.
This resource contains idiom worksheets with text-based questions and answer keys for each.
This lesson uses narrative structures to introduce students to one form of expository writing—news briefs and articles. By condensing a short story into a newspaper article and expanding an article into a short story, students will explore the ways that exposition differs from narration.
In this lesson and resource, students practice identifying main ideas in informational text and distinguish between explicit and implicit statements.