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 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.

This activity supports English language development for English language learners. This activity introduces students to opinions and debate. Students work in groups to prepare arguments for a topic. Students present their arguments and comment on the arguments of the opposition group. Students use the language of opinion to express agreement and disagreement. Students listen, speak, read, and write in this lesson.

Students will explore how an artist emphasized the narrative in a work of art that depicts a single moment from the story. They then write a newspaper article, using visual clues in the painting to imagine how the narrative depicted many have unfolded.

In this lesson, students use timelines to help motivate them to read more nonfiction, which will, in turn, help increase their comprehension of nonfiction. Students begin with a discussion about timelines and their use to prepare for the research activity. Using a historical timeline and the students' prior knowledge of events, students predict when specific inventions were produced and take notes describing their reason for identifying that particular year.

In this lesson, students will create an original political campaign song for a fictional presidential candidate. The campaign song will be created after learning how to use political terms appropriately through research and classroom discussions. Research will include the basic processes of the electoral college, the importance of campaign tours, and the historical importance of campaign songs.

In this lesson, students use previewing to activate their prior knowledge and set a purpose for reading. Using a strategy called THIEVES, which is an acronym for title, headings, introduction, every first sentence in a paragraph, visuals and vocabulary, end-of-chapter questions, and summary, students are guided through a preview of a nonfiction text. After guided practice, partners work together to use the strategy to preview a chapter from a textbook.

Students can use the ADDIE Model Template to plan their project-based learning assignment.

This lesson helps students "hear" some of the diverse colonial voices that, in the course of time and under the pressure of novel ideas and events, contributed to the American Revolution. Students analyze a variety of primary documents illustrating the diversity of religious, political, social, and economic motives behind competing perspectives on questions of independence and rebellion.

In this unit from the Standford University The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute students develop a broader understanding of the struggle for equality from 1868 to the present by exploring first-person narratives from a diverse group of Americans. Beginning with a study of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, students determine the criteria for identifying an event as historically significant. Students then explore the impact of the struggle for equality by interviewing people in their community and utilizing resources such as Toni Morrison’s Remember: The Journey to School Integration, Voices of Civil Rights, a national oral history project by the Library of Congress, and StoryCorps, an independent non-profit project that focuses on oral history collections of individuals’ life experiences.

In this lesson, students explore the First Industrial Revolution in early nineteenth-century America. Through simulation activities and the examination of primary historical materials, students learn how changes in the workplace and less expensive goods led to the transformation of American life.

This "jigsaw" activity will give students the opportunity to work in groups to summarize a 1 to 2 page informational text. It "jigsaws" down to 1 class summary and can be done in 2 or 3 days.

After an overview of the events surrounding Paul Revere's famous ride, this lesson challenges students to think about the reasons for that fame. Using both primary and secondhand accounts, students compare the account of Revere's ride in Longfellow's famous poem with actual historical events, in order to answer the question: why does Revere's ride occupy such a prominent place in the American consciousness?

Explore the traditions and conventions of haiku and compare this classic form of Japanese poetry to a related genre of Japanese visual art.