This resource includes an excerpt from the book, "Two Hot Dogs with Everything", six text-dependent questions, one constructed-response writing prompt, and explanatory information for teachers regarding alignment to the CCSS.
This teacher's guide for The Dark Side of Nowhere by Neal Shusterman contains a summary of the text, discussion questions, activities, and research assignments.
The following unit incorporates multimedia and classroom activities to encourage students to explore and interact with poetry by first writing letters to important historical poets as practice for writing letters to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors, a group that represents poetry in America at its best.
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 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.
"The Dog of Pompeii" centers on a blind boy, Tito, and his dog, Bimbo, his life-long devoted companion during A.D. 79 in the city of Pompeii. Bimbo is crucial to Tito’s survival because and during the course of the story, a volcano erupts and causes mass panic and death. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.
This teacher's guide for Doll Bones by Holly Black contains a prereading activity, discussion questions, and postreading assignments.
Students will read the story, Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold and compare thier own lives with that of a girl in a tenement builidng in New York City. Through reading the story, students will better understand the hopes and dreams of the less fortunate.
Student will predict ideas or events that may take place in the text, give rationale for predictions, confirm and discuss predictions as the story progresses.
In the Drive-In Movies, young Gary Soto wants his mother to take him and his siblings to the drive-in movies, a special treat. His plan is to be very good and to do lots of chores one Saturday morning and afternoon in order to impress his mother. Unfortunately, he works so hard at weeding, mowing, and waxing the car that he falls asleep during the movie. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.
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.
As a way to support teachers with English Language Arts (ELA) instruction during the pandemic, the NCDPI ELA team created choice boards featuring standards-aligned ELA activities.The intended purpose of these choice boards is to provide a way for students to continue standards-based learning while schools are closed. Each activity can be adapted and modified to be completed with or without the use of digital tools. Many activities can also be repeated with different texts. These standards-based activities are meant to be a low-stress approach to reinforcing and enriching the skills learned during the 2019-2020 school year. The choice boards are to be used flexibly by teachers, parents, and students in order to meet the unique needs of each learner.Exploration activities are provided for a more self-directed or guided approach to independent learning for students. These activities and sites should be used as a way to explore concepts, topics, skills, and social and emotional competencies that interest the learner.
A guideline for teachers to compare the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce and discuss how their narration choices affect the piece and the reader.
In this lesson, students engage in a close reading of Hopper's painting and an Edward Hirsch poem to explore the types of emotion generated by each work in the viewer or reader, and how the painter and poet each achieved these responses.
Rachel wakes up on her eleventh birthday feeling as if she’s still ten—and nine, and eight, and all the ages that came before and the day just gets worse from there. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.
This is unit utilizes Historical Fiction and Nonfiction text to address standards such as determining a theme; providing a summary; Describing how the plot unfolds as well as the character’s response; and explaining how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or speaker in a text.
This lesson leads students through an exploration of age-appropriate texts of various formats that are in their own ways revisionist fairy tales. After reading the stories Ella Enchanted and The Courageous Princess, students write journal entries on which of the two stories' heroines they’d most like to be. Next they read the poem "Grethel" and then compare and contrast all three female leads. Then students choose one of the texts and write their own revisions by turning the poem or book into another form. Finally, students share their work and assess their own writing using a class-created rubric.
In this lesson, students will look behind the story at the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that shape the narrative throughout Esperanza Rising. The lesson also invites students to contemplate some of the changes Esperanza undergoes as she grows into a responsible young woman and the contradictions that she experiences.
In this unit, students examine story elements and vocabulary associated with mystery stories through Directed Learning–Thinking Activities and then track these features as they read mystery books from the school or classroom library. Several activities at the Millennium Mystery Madness website, plus a story map project, add to their understanding and appreciation of the mystery genre. Students plan their own original mystery stories with the help of the interactive Mystery Cube, peer edit and revise their stories, and publish them online.
In this lesson the students will be using a variety of skills to analyze fiction and expository texts. This combines the reading of detective fiction with written expository analysis in the form of a Detective’s Handbook. Each student reads a detective mystery, and the class watches and analyzes Murder She Purred to establish a collective example.
In this lesson students will use fables to determine the moral or central theme of a piece of writing. Students then create their own personal fables editing for grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling.