In this 3 day lesson that includes 5 activities, students will learn to use questions to guide their approach to, reading, and deeper analysis of texts.

A concept map help students visualize various connections between words or phrases and a main idea. There are several types of concept maps; some are hierarchical, while others connect information without categorizing ideas. Most are comprised of words or phrases surrounded by a circle or square that connect to one another and ultimately back to the main idea through graphic lines. These lines help students to "negotiate meaning" as they read and make the meaning connections between the main idea and other information.

In this 2-3 day, 4 activity lesson, students will learn the importance and elements of making evidence-based claims through a close reading of part of the text. Students will focus on critical reading and thinking.

In this activity, students analyze primary source documents in order to better understand the content, impact, and perpetual relevance of the U.S. Constitution to the daily lives of American citizens.

Students explore the genre of menus by analyzing existing menus from local restaurants. After establishing the characteristics of the genre, students work in groups to choose a restaurant and then create their own custom menus. They then analyze the use of adjectives and descriptive language on sample menus before revising their own menus with attention to descriptive phrasing. The final menus are customizable.

This lesson employs scientific observation, descriptive writing, sketching, reading, investigation, and poetry writing to train students to use their senses and focus their attention. The lesson is designed to enhance cognitive skills used in nearly every discipline and can serve as a prelude to an inquiry project, scientific investigation, art project, or descriptive writing assignment.

To promote development, detail, and focus of ideas in students’ writing, it sometimes helps to start with a fun, creative writing activity that encourages what you want to see in all of their writing. In this minilesson, students practice writing detailed, sensory-rich descriptions by framing a small piece of nature and freewriting about it. From this, students can develop a variety of types of writing including poetry, short stories, science writing, reflections, and other academic genres.

This lesson provides a way to combine scientific topics into an English lesson. Students apply specific comprehension strategies to multimodal texts as they investigate and interrogate the effects and possible causes of global warming. Students explore global warming through a variety of photographs, diagrams, and websites. As they look at each type of media, students catalog the strengths and weaknesses of these representations before identifying comprehension strategies that can be applied across various media.

The media has a huge effect on popular culture. Television programs underscore stereotypes of various groups of people.This lesson provides a platform in which students can critically analyze popular television programs. By looking at the media critically, students develop an awareness of the messages that are portrayed through the media.

This curriculum guide for The Heart of Everything That Is: Young Readers Edition: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin contains discussion questions for each chapter, key vocabulary terms, and extra activities for after reading.

Working in small groups, students will work produce sections of an historical newspaper or journal for publication in democratic Athens. Using the resources of this Web site (as well as books and other resources listed in the Research Links & Resources Page) pick an approximate date and research stories for your newspaper. This section has been tailored for a newspaper about Athens during the time of Pericles, because of the greater amount of information available for that period. However, with some adaptation and additional research it would be possible to compile newspapers for early or later periods.

This unit is designed to teach about the causes and effects of the Great Depression, and provide an introduction to the use of primary sources in the study of history. This historical discovery approach will emphasize the role of the historian as detective using such skills as observation, discrimination, analysis, and synthesis to research and record history. Students will explore primary sources including photographs, poems, song lyrics, documents, maps, cartoons, as well as, secondary source texts in print and online.

In this lesson, students use online sites to find primary sources from the period. They will then work collaboratively to analyze the primary sources they find and present their analysis to the class.

In this lesson, students work in small groups to analyze various myths alluded to in the Lightning Thief to determine themes for later literary analysis of the central text.

In this lesson, students will continue to cite text-based evidence in order to answer text dependent questions, as well as develop their own claims using details from paragraphs 20-23 of Steve Jobs' speech. Additionally, students will connect the events described by Steve Jobs to those experienced by Bud in Bud, Not Buddy.

Most people read and understand better when reading print. Usually when we are online, we are jumping around from place to place. To read online and really understand, we need to slow down and really think about what we are reading. In this lesson, students practice strategies to help them read deeply online. These strategies are based on the article in the lesson resources: "Strategies to Help Students 'Go Deep' When Reading Digitally" by Katrina Schwartz.Teacher copies the text from an online article into a Google Doc and shares it with students. Students use the highlighting tool to mark the most challenging vocabulary words and use strategies to determine their meaning. Then they develop a main idea for a paragraph by choosing one, two, three, and finally four words that make up the main idea. They type this above the paragraph and use formatting tools to make it a heading. As they repeat this process with additional paragraphs they are developing a summary of the article in the document outline.

In this cross-curricular poetry and biology unit, Li-Young Lee’s poem “Mnemonic” is used to explore how memory works. Students begin by brainstorming a list of their own memories and circling interesting words and phrases that they share with the class and then incorporating these words and phrases into a piece of writing. Students next discuss the brain and how memory is stored, leading students to dissect Li-Young Lee’s poem “Mnemonic.” As they apply this scientific information to the poem, students better understand the kinds of memories the speaker has in the poem and where those memories might be located in the brain. Groups of students then plan and complete projects in which they create a product that relates to memory, in one of three categories: informational, creative, or personal.

While this lesson makes use of websites about Anne Frank and the Holocaust, teachers can easily adapt the activities to a variety of topics. Guided by the questions on the Observation and Inquiry Sheet provided, students work together to explore several online texts on the chosen topic. Then they examine one website in depth and consider how the unique features of the site are used to convey information about the topic. In a subsequent Silent Conversation, students initiate their own queries and discussions about the substantive content of the online texts. Students meet as a class to share their impressions and opinions of the various sites.