In this lesson, mature students are introduced to The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Students view a powerpoint presentation with background information about the book before beginning the reading. This lesson also has helpful notes for the teacher about addressing the mature themes of the novel before beginning to read.

This introductory lesson gives students some of the background information they'll need to be successful in a unit based on William Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night. Students write mini-scripts about love, then go through an early speech from the play to acclimate themselves to Shakespeare's language.

In this lesson, students place important life events in chronological order on a timeline, retell stories to describe past events, people, and places, and use primary sources (e.g. photos, artifacts, maps) to study people and events from the past.

In this lesson, students explore the concept of balance by attemting to balance their bodies, rulers, and other common classroom objects. Vocabulary introduced in this lesson includes, gravity, balance, counterbalance, and stability.

In this lesson, students are introduced to the book On The Road by Jack Kerouac. This page has information for teachers to help them decide what to focus on in the book, along with an introductory powerpoint and a test.

In this lesson, the students will learn about how weather makes the seasons.

In this lesson, students participate in a review activity for recently taught content. The activity is adaptable to whatever has been covered recently in class. Students work together to silently match up pre-distributed cards featuring terms or concepts that need review.

This lesson plan encourages students to examine point of view by writing an eyewitness account. This lesson plan can be used with any novel the students might happen to be reading - students choose a character from whose perspective they'd be interested in examining things.

In this lesson, students learn about the types of irony after an analytical reading of Kate Chopin's classic short story, The Story of an Hour.

In this lesson, students learn the details about when and how to use semicolons, then practice the skills on sentence strips.

This lesson plan has several options for ways of teaching the poem "The Road Not Taken" to students. The plan offers guiding questions, analytical information, and different ways for students to respond after completing their reading of the poem.

In this lesson, students are walked through the process of creating a works-cited page and learn how important the process is when writing a research paper.

This resource contains lessons to teach students how to practice safety and to know when the appropriate time to call 911.

This lesson details methods for teaching students about complex sentences. Students examine the types of sentences, then practice combining elements into a complex sentence.

In this lesson, students review similes and their use before practicing finding similes in a paragraph. Students then complete a handout asking them to write their own similes.

This lesson builds high school students' writing skills while helping them share their feelings. Students write formal letters to their grandparents as the start of journals filled with correspondance between student and grandparent. Students also engage in peer-review of each others' letters.

In this lesson, students take on the challenge of teaching each other about literary terms. Students are assigned terms for which they design posters which are passed between students to share their information with their classmates.

This lesson encourages students to justify their thoughts about literature by prompting them with ambiguous test questions. Students take the test without understanding that questions are intentionally unclear, then justify their answers with textual citations for credit.

In this lesson, students gain background information on the author of Lord of the Flies, William Golding. Students complete a webquest that has them research on the William Golding home page to learn about the novelist before they read.

In this lesson, students learn about the differences between inference and prediction, then review some strategies for making both. Students then create a chart to help them make inferences and predictions as they read.