This resource provides a lesson designed to utilze letter and wordplay as students create a poem as a class. Afterwards, students will work independently to draft a word poem of their own.

This poem guide from the Poetry Foundation allows students to gain a deeper understanding of an ancient Arabic form, re-envisioned by a contemporary poet.

This provides lesson ideas for ELLs, classroom management concerns and therefore would be useful for new teachers and teachers new to sheltered instruction.

This Random House for High School Teachers reader's guide includes an introduction, discussion questions, and author biography designed to enhance student reading of Philip Roth's American Pastoral.

In this lesson, students explore literature and try to describe the ways humor plays a role. Students consider the rhetorical devices involved in creating humor before searching for them in texts.

How do metaphors help us better understand the world? And, what makes a good metaphor? Explore these questions with writers like Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg who have mastered the art of bringing a scene or emotion to life in this 5 minute lesson.

This resource for "Letter One" from Letters to a Young Poet focuses on how to craft a formal, multi-paragraph essay on how word choice impacts meaning and tone.

In this Common Core aligned teacher's guide to Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel, students will explore the idea that that there is more than one way of seeing and more than one way of communicating. This guide provides suggested topics for discussions, terms for consideration, supplemental reading, and activities.

Students match the character traits of a character in a book they are reading with specific actions the character takes. Students then work in pairs to "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using Internet reference tools to compile lists of accurate, powerful adjectives supported with details from the reading. The lesson uses The Scarlet Letter as an example, but this activity is effective with any work of literature in which characterization is important.

Noh, the oldest surviving Japanese dramatic form, combines elements of dance, drama, music, and poetry into a highly stylized, aesthetic retelling of a well-known story from Japanese literature, such as The Tale of Genji or The Tale of the Heike. This lesson provides an introduction to the elements of Noh plays and to the text of two plays, and provides opportunities for students to compare the conventions of the Noh play with other dramatic forms with which they may already be familiar, such as the ancient Greek dramas of Sophocles. By reading classic examples of Noh plays, such as Atsumori, students will learn to identify the structure, characters, style, and stories typical to this form of drama. Students will expand their grasp of these conventions by using them to write the introduction to a Noh play of their own.

In these activities, students utilize play to refine and clarify vocabulary without feeling embarrassed or singled out in the classroom. Suggested methods include creating non-examples to show understanding; using online tools like Wordle or Visual Thesaurus; drawing pictures of unknown words; and using physical movement and a intensity rating scale to determine nuance and meaning.

Students are prompted to challenge their notion of synonyms being words that "mean the same" by investigating key words in Robert Frost's poem, "Choose Something Like a Star." First, they build an understanding of connotation and register by categorizing synonyms for the title word, "choose." Then they develop lists of synonyms for words of their choice elsewhere in the poem and collaborate on a full analysis, focusing on the relationship between word choice and the elements of speaker, subject, and tone.

Clarifying one’s identity is a process that goes on throughout life. In this poetry lesson, students will read, analyze and discuss Adrienne Rich's “Diving into the Wreck” as part of the complicated process of finding, and defining oneself.

Students will read and analyze sonnets to discover their traditonal forms. Students will chart the poems' characteristics, including the poetic features and their emtional responses to the poems. Then they review the details for similarities, deducing traditional sonnet forms that the poems have in common. After this introduction, students write original sonnets, using one of the poems they have analyzed as a model.

This Random House for High School Teachers reader's guide includes an introduction, discussion questions, and author biography designed to enhance student reading of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, Ann Packer’s critically acclaimed and bestselling debut novel.

In this lesson, students look forward to the end of the school year by writing a poem about summertime. Students can use several different types of poems to express their thoughts about their coming vacations.

This resource provides a lesson designed to help students understand the use of satire and the myriad technicques that authors may use to add it to their writing. Students use the film Shrek to examine the four techniques of exaggeration, incongruity, reversal and parody. Students prove their understanding by using satire to rewrite a fairly tale.

In this lesson, students will participate in a group gallery walk activity, as well as analyzing an Emily Dickinson poem and examining her use of the extended metaphor.

This resource includes a lesson that requires students to read a short memoir prior to writing a memoir for a family member. Students are tasked with interviewing the family member prior to formulating their memoir, which may take the forms of photographic collages, image panels, a painting, a video, musical composition, sculpture or any other creative method. This lesson was designed to accompany the PBS documentary, The Mystery of Love. Links are provided to the PBS website for the documentary.