After breaking down and discussing the Declaration of Independence, students have a chance to show their understanding of the argument presented by creating a political cartoon and defending their choices in creating it.

Students will evaluate the arguments in the Declaration of Independence and then they will write their own declaration of independence to separate their school from the district. They will also plan for what will happen after the separation. This is a great connection to Animal Farm, but does not have to be taught while reading this book. 

In this lesson, students will use the Evaluating Argument and Evidence Tool and evaluate the author's arguments in shedding light on the specific obstacles to safety reform in the garment industry.

In this lesson, students will work in small groups to read and analyze a primary source using a set of questions designed to help them understand the writers' viewpoints. Students will then explain their findings to their classmates. Finally, each student will produce a written essay that explains how and why scientific understanding of the atom has changed over time.

In this lesson on Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Unlock Animal Behavior, students will individually develop their own claim and find evidence to support that claim, supporting their research with the text.

In this lesson, students will write global evidence-based claims after reading a text. Students will discuss both in pairs and as a class, evaluating approach and technique.

In this lesson, students will complete their reading of "How your Addiction to Fast Fashion Kills" and use the Evaluating Argument and Evidence Tool to explore the author's arguments.

This news brief from October 2010 examines new research that makes it clear that Tibetan highlanders have not just acclimated to their mountain home; evolutionary adaptations have equipped them with unique physiological mechanisms for dealing with low oxygen levels.

This resource provides a lesson that tasks high school students with assisting elementary level students to gain a deeper understanding of the expeditions of Lewis and Clark. The lesson is framed around the work, How We Crossed the West. As a culminating activity, the elementary students will produce a festival to prove what they have learned to the high school students.

This lesson will help students identify the various uses of language and understand their appropriateness within context. Students participate in journal writing as well as writing literacy narratives describing multiple uses of language. The lesson is designed to accompany a ready of "Mother Tongue"; however, the lesson may be used in conjunction with a study of other writings in English by authors who write or speak English as a second language.

This resource provides a lesson designed to assist students with identifying the skills they use to read and comprehend with a small group. Afterwards, learners with use some of those strategies to read online, informational texts. As a culminating activty, students will report their discoveries through discussion pertaining to the differences in reading physical and online texts and the strategies they used.

Worksheets and activities with answer keys to help students of differing levels identify and/or determine the difference between fact and opinion in selected passages.

How do you make sense of contrasting accounts of historical events? What makes one source more reliable than another? How does corroborating information across sources help confirm or discredit historical accounts? In this lesson, students engage in such questions as they evaluate and compare different types of primary source documents with different perspectives on working conditions in English textile factories at the beginning of the 19th century.

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 on Family Ties from Teaching Tolerance, students will critically evaluate media messages on the issue of immigration and families, illustrate a narrative, and prepare and conduct an interview and debate on how undocumented status affects the day-to-day lives of immigrant families, particularly women.

Students will reflect on their reading experiences in and out of school and discuss the roles that both fiction and non-fiction played. Next, they will become familiar with what the Commmon Core Standards say about reading, and what critics and supporters have written in reaction. Ultimately, students will write about the question, "What should students read?"

This news brief from December 2009 focuses on malaria. Malaria is normally treatable, but now some strains are evolving resistance to our most effective drug. Students will find out how researchers and doctors are trying to control the evolution of the disease.

This lesson is the first of a two-part series focused on how scientists perform their work. These lessons make use of a book called The Frog Scientist, by Pamela S. Turner. Students will read the book and view and analyze supplemental resource materials to better understand how scientists are using the scientific method to study human environmental impact.

Students will go "inside" the NY Times Best Sellers List to explore recent best sellers across categories, then use those lists as models to create their own in categories of their choosing. They will write one-sentence summaries for each book on their lists, then analyze and explain their choices by writing "Inside the List" articles. Ultimately, students will answer the question, "What do best-seller lists tell us about our culture?"

In this activity students read letters from ordinary people to government leaders in the Roosevelt Administration. Then they interpret the range of attitudes about the changing role of the federal government during the New Deal. The letters for this activity all contain reading supports and teachers can differentiate this activity for different levels of learners by choosing which letters to use in the activity.