This activity emphasizes the importance of teaching reading and writing strategies for students to use with informational text.

This lesson provides an opportunity for students to not only read and view the importance of choosing career choices now, but gives them an opportunity to write about their future career goals and think about the best way to achieve them starting now.

Through multiple lessons, students will explore career choices, set educational goals, and create a media project in which they share information about their chosen career.

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.

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

Listen-Read-Discuss (LRD) is a comprehension strategy that builds students' prior knowledge before they read a text. During the first stage, students listen as you present the content of their reading through a lecture, often paired with a graphic organizer. Next, students read the text and compare what they have learned during the lecture to their understanding of reading the text on their own. Finally, students discuss their understanding of the text with other students in their small/large group.

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 students will explore reading strategies using the think-aloud process as students investigate connections between the life and writings of Edgar Allan Poe. The unit, which begins with an in-depth exploration of “The Raven,” then moves students from a full-class reading of the poem to small-group readings of Poe’s short stories (“The Black Cat,” “Hop-Frog,” “Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”). The unit concludes with individual projects that explore the readings in more detail.

In this unit students practice writing to an essential question, using context clues and root words to determine word meaning, close reading with the aid of a glossary, taking notes with graphic organizers, re-reading to answer text dependent questions; and summarizing.

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.

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.

This lesson is one part of a four lesson unit on Shakespeare Stealer. This theater and language arts lesson offers intellectual, creative and interpretive opportunities. Students will analyze and compare the puns and word play in selected scenes from the plays, The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary L. Blackwood and Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. Students will then read scenes from each play in groups and interpret their meanings to prepare for a performance of the scene. The lesson culminates with students writing a short essay explaining how the playwrights used puns and word play to give their characters wit.

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.

After reading narratives from former slaves that were recorded in the 1930's as part of the Federal Writers' Project, students conduct research on slavery and tell a story based on their findings. The lesson incorporates an exploration of storytelling techniques.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 7th Grade English Language Arts.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 7th Grade ELA. 

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.