In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will explore the role of poetry in American politics, compare Angelou and Frost, and consider how Angelou’s poem reflects the challenges and concerns of the time. Discussion questions, teaching tips, and a student handout push students to engage with Angelou’s words and to think critically about her famous work.

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 explore how growing up in the South during the Jim Crow Era influenced Maya Angelou’s writing. The power of memory and the importance of setting inform both the video and discussion questions as students are asked to consider why Maya Angelou chose to write about her own life in her famous autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will learn about the lasting impact of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and why it’s such an important piece of American literature. Students will answer discussion questions, analyze text from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and write a short essay to gain a deeper understanding of Angelou’s work.

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.

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.

Students examine the impact of digital technology on print journalism and develop creative ideas for delivering news

In this lesson, students examine the impact of digital technology on print journalism and develop creative ideas for delivering news

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.

Utilize these questions with literature recommended for bibliotherapy use with gifted students. This is a remix of "Bibliotherapy Questions for Gifted Students created by DANNEY DAILEY II.

In the remix, two thinking routines have been added to support the questions.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 6th Grade Math.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 8th 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.