In this lesson, by focusing on selected passages, students understand Dickens’ language and recognize the protagonist’s adamant refusal to participate in the holiday celebrated by everyone around him.
This lesson leads students beyond a summary and discussion of characters and events to an understanding of the major themes of the novel.
Students examine Scrooge’s experiences with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future and discover how Dickens used both direct and indirect characterization to create a protagonist who is more than just a stereotype.
This lesson helps students become more familiar with poetry concepts by using photography to jumpstart the critical thinking process. Students compare photographs to poetry after recording their reactions to each.
What if Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was set in a modern and newly independent nation? What do citizens look for in a leader? In this lesson, students not only consider the significance of this updated staging and political quandary, but will address important questions about how and why Shakespeare is adopted, adapted, and appropriated by people around the world in order for them to express their own political and social concerns through the universal language of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's preeminence as a dramatist rests in part on his capacity to create vivid metaphors and images that embody simple and powerful human emotions. This lesson is designed to help students understand how Shakespeare's language dramatizes one such emotion: fear.
Students search an online version of Shakespeare's Macbeth for clues to the motives behind Macbeth's precipitous descent into evil.
By means of group performances, writing exercises, and online search activities, students learn about the sometimes dangerous and destructive powers of language, particularly when wielded by such an eloquent and unscrupulous character as Shakespeare's Iago.
As one of literature's most iconic figures, both Shakespeare's plays and poetry provide an interesting glimpse into a variety of essential themes. In this lesson, students will examine how Shakespeare used the sonnet tradition to enhance his stagecraft by performing a scene from his play Romeo and Juliet.
The realities of slavery and Reconstruction hit home in poignant oral histories from the Library of Congress. In these activities, students research narratives from the Federal Writers' Project and describe the lives of former African slaves in the U.S. -- both before and after emancipation. From varied stories, students sample the breadth of individual experiences, make generalizations about the effects of slavery and Reconstruction on African Americans, and evaluate primary source documents.
This lesson will focus on the views of the founders as expressed in primary documents from their own time and in their own words. Students will see that many of the major founders opposed slavery as contrary to the principles of the American Revolution.
This lesson focuses on the Crito, in which Socrates argues against the idea that he should escape the penalty of death imposed on him by Athens, laying the groundwork for future debates over the rights of the individual and the rule of law.
This essay written by a distinguished historian of American literature, gives an overview of the American slave narrative tradition, discusses five representative slave narratives, and provides a framework for cultural analysis of these works showing their intention and their arguments.
This lesson plan begins with the study of Sophocles' Antigone and the universal issues it raises about power, gender, family obligation, ethics, and honor. It then moves to an exploration of ancient Greece, accents the importance of theater and its staging, the nature of tragedy in this culture, and culminates in student presentations and performances.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, la primer gran poeta de América Latina, es considerada una de la figuras literarias más importantes del continente americano y una de las primeras feministas. En el siglo XVII, defendió su derecho a la educación, proponiendo la mayor participación de las mujeres en la cultura y la pedagogÃa en una sociedad dominada por los hombres.
This lesson studies the 17th century Mexican poet Sor Juana de la Cruz and analyzes her sonnets and the impact of the historical context on her works. The lesson includes: guiding questions, learning objectives, preparation instructions, lesson activities with activity sheets, assessment, extensions for the lesson and links to many resources. The lesson plan and the sonnets are in Spanish.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the first great Latin American poet, is still considered one of the most important literary figures of the American Hemisphere, and one of the first feminist writers. In the 1600s, she defended her right to be an intellectual, suggesting that women should be educated and educators and accusing men of being the cause of the very ills they blamed on women.
Students will be able to understand how the historical and cultural contexts influence literary creation. Students will identify and effectively analyze sonnets of the Spanish Golden Age in Spanish. Furthermore, students will listen, comprehend, read and analytically write about poetry in Spanish.
This lesson will examine the U.S.-Soviet disagreements regarding Germany and Eastern Europe. Students will read excerpts from the agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam, then, based on later documents, will study how these arrangements unraveled. Finally they will look at two opposing American views of the Soviet Union and of the strategy that the United States should use in dealing with it.
While the French had kept their end of the bargain by completing the statue itself, the Americans had still not fulfilled their commitment to erect a pedestal. In this lesson, students learn about the effort to convince a skeptical American public to contribute to the effort to erect a pedestal and to bring the Statue of Liberty to New York.