In this lesson on the Spanish American War from Historical Thinking Matters, students will use contrasting newspaper accounts of the explosion of the Maine to gain insight into how an author’s word and information choices influence the message and tone of the text. Students will view a 3-minute movie to establish context, use a graphic organizer to compare the articles, and write an essay where they take a position about which account is most believable.

How do great authors build suspense and keep us engaged? In this lesson students will discuss how they "read" their favorite televsion shows in order to make predictions about what will happen, then apply these skills to speculate about happens to literary characters after the novel or play ends. Finally, they will use the inferences they gain thorugh close reading to create imagined futures for these characters in comic strips, next chapters, letters, journals, or videos.

Students will use The New York Times and George Orwell's Animal Farm and/or 1984 to explore the relevance of the novel in today's contemporary society and discern how many of the book"™s warnings are relevant today.

In this recurring lesson, students watch an artistic video clip and use the words in their current vocabulary lesson to process the content through several types of creative writing. This gives students a chance to write in a unique voice and to understand the meaning of their vocabulary words in a new context. They also have the opportunity to analyze their peers' use of the vocabulary when they read and discuss each other's stories.

In this lesson, students examine various perspectives on gun violence and solutions to school shootings by reading an article and watching a series of videos.

Walt Whitman tried to capture the exuberance of the American spirit in his poem I Hear America Singing.  His words create an image of a working class who happily goes about its day developing a young America.  Other poets have captured their feelings as well, such as Langston Hughes in his poem I, Too Sing America.  Using the rich website Poets.org, students can explore and analyze a wealth of poetic voices that document America and ultimately create their own poem contributing to the voices that have described their America. 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 learn background information on Alice Walker, author of THe Color Purple. Students take notes from a powerpoint presentation before creating poetry pictures using collage materials or their own drawings to depict what they see in Walker's poetry.