Double-Entry Journaling improves students' comprehension, vocabulary, and content retention. This interactive strategy activates prior knowledge and present feelings, and promotes collaborative learning. It fosters the connection between reading and writing as students are able to "reply" to the author or speaker as they write their responses. The technique offers flexibility in that teachers can use any form of written text, read alouds, or listenings that are assigned in class.

In this lesson, students will understand examples of persuasive language and will learn about conditions in the Dust Bowl region in the mid-1930s by examining a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a letter written by farmer Caroline Henderson.

In this resource, students will explore how to find a main idea and form an inference from informational text, as well as how to identify supporting details and form a summary. A variety of approaches--from think-pair-share to small group instruction--are included, as well as graphic organizers and modeling ideas.

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. 

Students will learn how the field of war correspondence has evolved. Through reading chapters of Edith Warton's book, "Fighting France From Dunkerque to Belfort," students will cite examples of wartime reporting. FInally, students will create and present their own correspondence report.

Why was the Emancipation Proclamation important? While the Civil War began as a war to restore the Union, not to end slavery, by 1862 President Abraham Lincoln came to believe that he could save the Union only by broadening the goals of the war. Students can explore the obstacles and alternatives America faced in making the journey toward "a more perfect Union."

Students will explore the question "What is an American" through both historical and modern lenses, discussing how the concept of American identity and the American Dream has evolved over time. Through a power point presentation, class discussion, reading historical and modern interpretations, and completing an art project, students will gain an understanding of the emergence of an American identity.

Students develop a working definition of transcendentalism by answering and discussing a series a questions about their own individualism and relationship to nature. Over the next few sessions, students read and discuss excerpts from Emerson’s “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” and Thoreau’s Walden. They use a graphic organizer to summarize the characteristics of transcendental thought as they read. Students then examine modern comic strips and songs to find evidence of transcendental thought. They gather additional examples on their own to share with the class. Finally, students complete the chart showing specific examples of transcendental thought from a variety of multimodal genres.

This resource provides a lesson designed to assist students with identifying the skills they use to read and comprehend with a small group. Afterwards, learners with use some of those strategies to read online, informational texts. As a culminating activty, students will report their discoveries through discussion pertaining to the differences in reading physical and online texts and the strategies they used.

Students will examine a variety of primary sources (political cartoons, photographs, speeches, and posters) to examine the source, message, audience, and intent of the source. Through analysis of these sources, students will assess the need for aid in Europe after World War II and assess the impact of the aid program on participating countries.

This follow-up assignment to the reading of Chaucer's General Prologue gives students the opportunity to work in a collaborative setting with technology while explicating text and researching historical infromation. Aditionally students will work as a team to create group wikis.

In this lesson on Family Ties from Teaching Tolerance, students will critically evaluate media messages on the issue of immigration and families, illustrate a narrative, and prepare and conduct an interview and debate on how undocumented status affects the day-to-day lives of immigrant families, particularly women.

This activity asks students to analyze three primary documents about the experiences of young women who worked in textile factories in New England during the 1830s and 1840s. It provides worksheets to guide and support students in writing a paragraph that cites evidence about the documents.

In this lesson students will be introduced to Islamic culture while viewing the PBS video series Islam: Empire of Faith. Students will have the opportunity to research aspects of Islam by using the World Wide Web, library books, and other research tools. Students will also have the opportunity to work with classmates in creating an ABC Book of Islam based on their research, accompanied by visuals. *This is lesson 2 of unit on Islam entitled: Islam-Empires of Faith.

William Faulkner's self-proclaimed masterpiece, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, is a fascinating exploration of the many voices found in a Southern family and community. The following curriculum unit examines the novel's use of multiple voices in its narrative.

In this lesson, students anaylze the primary source Federalist No. 26. There are analysis questions at the end of the lesson and a teacher answer key.

This cross-curricular resource contains a primary source that argues for the ratification of the United States constitution, along with text-dependent questions, a vocabulary list, a writing prompt for writing to sources that includes sample student responses, and a graphic organizer to help students.

Students will explore the world of Medieval Europe. They will learn the way the people lived and how Phragmites was part of this world. Students will then be assigned a social class role in the system of feudalism and research information about their character's privileges and disadvantages. Students will experience the feudal system through activities and presentations to relay what they learned to their class. Students may choose a variety of creative outlets to express their character's life in their own creative way with a group or separately.

This activity is meant to be used in conjunction with the article "A Fire Waiting to Be Lit: The Origins of World War I." In this activity, students debate the following proposition: The Austrian government should have accepted the Serbian responses as meeting its demands. The article can be accessed at: http://www.crf-usa.org/resources/a-fire-waiting-to-be-lit-the-origins-of-world-war-i

This acitvity is meant to be used in conjunction with the article "A Fire Waiting to Be Lit: The Origins of World War I." In this activity, students create plans for successfully resolving the crisis that occurred following Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. The article can be accessed at: http://www.crf-usa.org/resources/a-fire-waiting-to-be-lit-the-origins-of-world-war-i