American author Pearl S. Buck spent most of her life in China. She returned to America in 1934, "an immigrant among immigrants"¦in my native land." In this lesson, students will explore American attitudes toward immigration in the 1930s through Pearl S. Buck's essay, "On Discovering America." They will explore the meaning of the term "American" in this context and look at how the media portrayed immigrants.

In this lesson, students reflect on the life of Maya Angelou and how her experiences influenced her poetry. Then they will analyze the poem "On the Pulse of the Morning," and discuss their emotional reactions to the poem.

Trace the elements of history, literature, polemic, and autobiography in the 1847Â Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave.

In this lesson, students view podcasting as a form of communication. Students will read and discuss podcasting, listen to a podcast, and work collaboratively to produce their own podcast.

This cross-curriculum lesson includes instruction and resources on politcal satire. The culminating activity has students either write, act, or draw their own political satire piece.

In this lesson, students will compare and contrast textual evidence provided by primary and secondary sources. The second learning objective is for students to evaluate the influence and importance of the media's role in public opinion of Hiroshima.

Power Notes is a strategy that teaches students an efficient form of organizing information from assigned text. This technique provides students a systematic way to look for relationships within material they are reading. Power Notes help visually display the differences between main ideas and supportive information in outline form. Main ideas or categories are assigned a power 1 rating. Details and examples are assigned power 2s, 3s, or 4s.

This lesson plan, The Power of Freedom, focuses on Dr. Martin Luther King’s most well-known and frequently taught classic works, like “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream.” Students read and discuss the themes in both works and connect to events in their lives today.

This article examines the events in Czechoslovakia known as the Prague Spring. It includes causes and effects of the period and a comparision chart to the Hungarian uprising. At the end of the article, there are reflection questions and a quiz for students to assess their knowledge.

This lesson addresses rhetorical strategies President Kennedy used in his inaugural address in 1961. This reading can come to life and be used to address good writing skills.

In this activity, students compare World War II propaganda posters from the United States, Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. Then students choose one of several creative or analytical writing assignments to demonstrate what they've learned.

Question-Answer relationship (QAR) is a strategy to be used after students have read. QAR teaches students how to decipher what types of questions they are being asked and where to find the answers to them. Four types of questions are examined in the QAR.

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun provides a compelling and honest look into one family's aspirations to move to another Chicago neighborhood and the thunderous crash of a reality that raises questions about for whom the "American Dream" is accessible.

Reading Guides help students navigate reading material, especially difficult textbook chapters or technical reading. Students respond to a teacher-created written guide of prompts as they read an assigned text. Reading Guides help students to comprehend the main points of the reading and understand the organizational structure of a text.

Students read and analyze excerpts from texts written by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and answer questions about the information presented, developing their nonfiction reading comprehension. This activity serves as a supplement to the HHMI short film The Origin of the Species: The Making of a Theory.

Two important speeches to be given during the Cold War were McCarthy’s Fifty-seven Names speech and Truman’s 1947 address to Congress, commonly known as the Truman Doctrine. These documents provide the advanced student the opportunity to analyze persuasive structure in two primary source documents(Reading Informational Texts  5, 6 and 9) as well as provide the opportunity to practice the specific vocabulary that is required for analyzing rhetoric at the advanced and college level (Language 5 and 6). Initially, these documents serve as practice for analyzing rhetoric for advanced students. Beyond the initial analysis of these documents, they pair well with Miller’s popular drama, The Crucible, to support Miller’s interpretation of the zeitgeist of the 1950s. This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

In this lesson, students will analyze multiple sources to write an extended response evaluating the effectiveness of the federal government's attempts to utilize the Freedmen's Bureau to implement and enforce the "Reconstruction Amendments" in the south between the years of 1865-1877.

Some regarded The Red Badge of Courage as unpatriotic and cowardly. The novel's more nuanced exploration of such values will be explored by students with a close reading of Chapter 23 in comparison with a more traditional tale of combat. Using their new understanding, students will be asked to select one of three published endings to The Red Badge of Courage best suited to their understanding of Crane's exploration of values in the novel.

The Red Badge of Courage's success refleced the birth of a modern sensibility; today we feel something is true when it looks like the sort of thing we see in newspapers or on television news. Gone are the trappings of romance and poetry and all the old ways of memorializing battle that had come to seem increasingly artificial, unreal. Increase your students' understanding of Crane's influences and how the novel's style helped convey a new realism.

The Committee of Public Safety's assumption of political power and rule between 1793 and 1794 marked what was arguably the most radical phase of the French Revolution. The Committee justified its excesses as necessary to protect against domestic and foreign counter-revolutionaries. In this lesson, students question the motives of the Committee through analyzing excerpts from the "Decree Against Profiteers" and "Law of Suspects."