In this activity, students will be divided into different roles--bracket makers, seeding committee, or class logo/bracket namers. The activity will span 3 weeks and take about 10 minutes each day, as students debate, support, and choose their picks for the "March Madness" of books, poetry, or short stories (or favorite characters, etc.). Students must discern, defend, and support their picks, offering the opportunity for assessing understanding of the texts.

This lesson from the Smithsonian has students taking the roles of Japanese Americans who faced internment during WWII. Students will read, sythesize and respond to first-hand accounts of internment and publish their responses on a Smithsonian blog page.

In this lesson, students will summarize information found in the Alabama Driver Manual and share their findings in a multimedia presentation. Students will be responsible for self-scoring and peer scoring the multimedia presentations.

This lesson plan has students do research on the myths surrounding Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. They will engage in reading, writing, and research activities that will have them learn skills in distinguishing truth from fiction as well as developing a deeper understanding about an important American historical document. Links to suggested sites for students to do their research on the myths are provided in the lesson.

During this extended unit, students will explore environmental sustainability from a number of different perspectives. They will dive deep into global policies regarding the environment, specifically the dedication of different countries to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Students will review and discuss specific case studies, offering their opinion of certain practices and policies. As a summative assessment, students will create a “Call to Action” project, with the intent of raising awareness and instigating action on environmental sustainability. This unit includes language (objectives, vocabulary, and lesson modifications) that will help the teacher meet the needs of ELL students. These strategies may be helpful for other students, as well.

The Paragraph Shrinking strategy allows each student to take turns reading, pausing, and summarizing the main points of each paragraph. Students provide each other with feedback as a way to monitor comprehension.

This lesson is designed to assist students with improving their use of punctuation to include: commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points. The lesson is designed to encourage students to focus on emotions and their connections with given forms of punctuation. By examining emotions, students gain the ability to better understand the different uses of various punctuation marks. The lesson includes multiple student handouts and examples. There are also pertinent extension activities attached.

This resource provides a lesson that is designed to assist learners with improving their ability to handle a graphic novel. Students will focus on the beginning of the work Persepolis and examine the art used to varying effects. Students will attempt to familiarize themselves with strategies pertaining to making connections to the visual elements presented.

Students will watch and discuss video clips that show how two men in Chile coped with being prisoners in concentration camps during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Each student will then create a non-fiction picture book that tells the story of one of these men and provides historical context.

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.

In this lesson, students use debate as a tool for discussing the Revolutionary War.

Studying Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," students explore the intricate relationship between a poem's form and its content.

This lesson has students look at the characters of Romeo and Juliet and perform a quick analysis in an attempt to figure out who to blame for the tragic ending of the play.

A Seed Discussion is a two-part strategy used to teach students how to engage in discussions about assigned readings. In the first part, students read selected text and identify "seeds" or key concepts of a passage which may need additional explanation. In the second part, students work in small groups to present their "seeds" to one another. Each "seed" should be thoroughly discussed before moving on to the next.

Students examine the state of the print newspaper industry, then debate its future.

In this lesson, students examine the state of the print newspaper industry, then debate its future.

This lesson focuses on the author's use of language; moreover, how it is used to convey mood, images, and meaning. Students are tasked here with examining a selection identifying examples of stylistic devices within the passages. Next, students discuss possible reasons for author's selected style choices. The lesson is detailed with examples from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, yet the lesson may be altered to be used with other instructor selected text.

Exploring the use of style in literature helps students understand how language conveys mood, images, and meaning. After exploring the styles of two authors, students will translate passages from one author into the style of another. Then they will translate fables into style of one of the authors.

A teaching guide for Harper Lee's classic To Kill A Mockingbird. Includes discussion questions, vocabulary, writing and discussion prompts and activities.

Students explore the commercial roots of the American Dream and analyze a historical or literary text that supports this philosophy in conversation with an Op-Ed column.