In this lesson, students will complete the Gathering Evidence graphic organizer and respond to one text dependent question independently as a grade, mid unit assessment. This task calls upon students to employ the practices of close reading that they have been practicing in earlier lessons.

In this lesson, students will synthesize their learning from Chapters 1-5 of A Long Walk to Water, focusing on their current understanding of Nya and Salva. This prepares them for a shift in focus to informational text in the following lesson.

This teacher's guide for Little Green by Chun Yu includes background information on the Cultural Revolution, discussion questions, activities, writing practices, and collaborative exercises.

In this lesson, students will use the individual experience of Mary McLeod Bethune to analyze choice, its affects on social equality, and impact on their own life experiences.

In this lesson students examine how imagery is used to represent ideas, themes, periods of history, and make cultural connections to poem, "Still I Rise." Students will reflect through written expression how resiliency is in their lives, school, and community.

The activities in this lesson invite students to focus on the characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream, to describe and analyze their conflicts, and then to watch how those conflicts get resolved.

This teacher's guide for The Misfits by James Howe containes discussion questions, activities, and research assignments.

This lesson will be completed once students have read the script of the play The Monsters are Due on Maple Street and watched the film adaptation on The Twilight Zone. Students will complete a learning menu that includes an appetizer, entree, and dessert. All students will complete the same starter and main course but will then have a choice for their dessert.

In this video resource from PBS Learning Media, students will consider Mark Twain as the enormous "noticer" and explore the humor that Twain found in the ordinary details of life.

In this lesson, students make a list of the ways original stories have been revised—changed or altered, not just “corrected”—to begin building a definition of global revision after reading several fractured fairy tales. After students have written a “revised” story of their own, they revise again, focusing more on audience but still paying attention to ideas, organization, and voice. During another session, students look at editing as a way to polish writing, establishing a definition of revision as a multi-level process.

The main character, Mr. Johnson, embarks upon quite the opposite of an ordinary day. This day he spends as a do-gooder, wandering the streets of the city, purposefully taking time to insert himself into the lives of the people he passes. His perfect day is juxtaposed the moment he returns home to his grumpy, negative wife. The irony is: most ordinary days are not filled with all great deeds, but rather a mixture of positive and negative experiences. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Behind many of the apparently simple stories of Robert Frost's poems are unexpected questions and mysteries. In this lesson, students analyze what speakers include or omit from their narrative accounts, make inferences about speakers' motivations, and find evidence for their inferences in the words of the poem.

Poets achieve popular acclaim only when they express clear and widely shared emotions with a forceful, distinctive, and memorable voice. But what is meant by voice in poetry, and what qualities have made the voice of Langston Hughes a favorite for so many people?

In this video resource from PBS Learning Media, students will identify and describe the influence slavery had on Mark Twain's writing and then determine the status of race relations and ethnic differences in their lives.

In this second activity based on Ken Burn's Mark Twain, students will consider examples of Twain's vernacular storytelling through his pictures of race relations and the lives of African Americans in his time.

In this lesson, students will continue to practice gathering evidence from the text to support their understanding of character point of view.

This lesson will be completed once students have read the script of the play A Raisin in the Sun and watched the film adaptation. Students will complete a learning menu that includes an appetizer, entree, and dessert. All students will complete the same appetizer and entree but will then have a choice for their dessert.