In this lesson students continue their close read from the previous lesson to include background knowledge about the important archetype of the hero’s journey through reading an informational article; this time focusing on vocabulary.

Jigsaw is a strategy that emphasizes cooperative learning by providing students an opportunity to actively help each other build comprehension. Use this technique to assign students to reading groups composed of varying skill levels. Each group member is responsible for becoming an "expert" on one section of the assigned material and then "teaching" it to the other members of the team.

A six week long Read Aloud plan for the book, The Last Boy at St. Edith's.

The following series of activities for the classroom allow students to explore and interact with poetry by writing letters to poets.

Students have read the novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and will compare and contrast the relationship of the blacks and whites in the 1930's to the relationship of blacks and whites in 2013.

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.

In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will explore the Harlem Writers Guild, the oldest African American writers association in the world. Teaching tips suggest asking students to research the Harlem Writers Guild and to think about writing as part of a community.

In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will learn about the connection between Maya Angelou and Malcolm X and their work in Ghana. Discussion questions and video included.

In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will examine Maya Angelou’s impact on those who knew her personally. Utilizing video, discussion questions and teaching tips, students will analyze and reflect on Angelou’s mentors in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

In this lesson, students will explain how new information connects to the topic and how the resources deepened their understanding of how to buy sustainably sourced fish.

Use literacy skills to make connections among those in your classroom with this lesson that focuses on building classroom community by sharing favorite texts with one another. In this lesson, the class explores environmental print then focuses specifically on a teacher-created display on a favorite book. After exploring the teacher’s display, students write about their own favorite book, genre, or author. Students then select one of several options for making a display of their favorite book to share with the class. After creating their own presentations, students share them with the class and complete peer- or self-assessments.

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.

The PQP technique—Praise–Question–Polish—requires group members to take a turn reading their drafts aloud as the other students follow along with copies. This oral reading helps the writer to hear the piece in another voice and to identify possible changes independently.

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.

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.

This lesson uses the postmodern picture book Black and White, by David Macaulay, to engage students in a deep analysis of writer's craft. Macaulay's book presents four separate story lines that playfully interact with one another throughout the text. Students explore ways in which authors use words and illustrations to create unexpected plots and connections within a text.

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 will read and analyze several examples of different texts, identifying the different genres represented in each. Students brainstorm alone and together what they need as readers to read and understand multigenre texts successfully. Students share findings and discuss strategies needed to comprehend, and by extension to write, these texts.