Chuck Close is an American artist who overcomes many obstacles in his life, both unexpected and self-induced. He overcame his first obstacle early in his childhood when he didn’t let his learning disorder stop him from becoming an artist. Later in his career, doctors told him his career was finished, but Chuck found a way to continue painting without full use of his body. In this CCSS lesson students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Students become familiar with the similarities and differences between electronic and printed text by comparing the textual aids included in a textbook with those of an educational website.

Students explore the genre of menus by analyzing existing menus from local restaurants. After establishing the characteristics of the genre, students work in groups to choose a restaurant and then create their own custom menus. They then analyze the use of adjectives and descriptive language on sample menus before revising their own menus with attention to descriptive phrasing. The final menus are customizable.

This lesson employs scientific observation, descriptive writing, sketching, reading, investigation, and poetry writing to train students to use their senses and focus their attention. The lesson is designed to enhance cognitive skills used in nearly every discipline and can serve as a prelude to an inquiry project, scientific investigation, art project, or descriptive writing assignment.

To promote development, detail, and focus of ideas in students’ writing, it sometimes helps to start with a fun, creative writing activity that encourages what you want to see in all of their writing. In this minilesson, students practice writing detailed, sensory-rich descriptions by framing a small piece of nature and freewriting about it. From this, students can develop a variety of types of writing including poetry, short stories, science writing, reflections, and other academic genres.

This lesson provides a way to combine scientific topics into an English lesson. Students apply specific comprehension strategies to multimodal texts as they investigate and interrogate the effects and possible causes of global warming. Students explore global warming through a variety of photographs, diagrams, and websites. As they look at each type of media, students catalog the strengths and weaknesses of these representations before identifying comprehension strategies that can be applied across various media.

The media has a huge effect on popular culture. Television programs underscore stereotypes of various groups of people.This lesson provides a platform in which students can critically analyze popular television programs. By looking at the media critically, students develop an awareness of the messages that are portrayed through the media.

This curriculum guide for The Heart of Everything That Is: Young Readers Edition: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin contains discussion questions for each chapter, key vocabulary terms, and extra activities for after reading.

In this lesson, students will learn how to use primary sources, and work in groups to create murals about the events and trends of a decade of the twentieth century. Students will focus their research on a specific category relating to the culture of that decade, and then depict their findings in their murals.

In this lesson, students will continue to cite text-based evidence in order to answer text dependent questions, as well as develop their own claims using details from paragraphs 20-23 of Steve Jobs' speech. Additionally, students will connect the events described by Steve Jobs to those experienced by Bud in Bud, Not Buddy.

This story is about a dinosaur find in New Mexico and after many years of information, the paleontologist attempts to persuade the reader about what happened to kill the dinosaur. In order to do so the author gives many ideas and theories but by evaluating evidence, narrows it down to one. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

In this cross-curricular poetry and biology unit, Li-Young Lee’s poem “Mnemonic” is used to explore how memory works. Students begin by brainstorming a list of their own memories and circling interesting words and phrases that they share with the class and then incorporating these words and phrases into a piece of writing. Students next discuss the brain and how memory is stored, leading students to dissect Li-Young Lee’s poem “Mnemonic.” As they apply this scientific information to the poem, students better understand the kinds of memories the speaker has in the poem and where those memories might be located in the brain. Groups of students then plan and complete projects in which they create a product that relates to memory, in one of three categories: informational, creative, or personal.

In this lesson, students create text sets and use them to practice three strategies for reading for information. Students select a topic they want to explore and work in small groups to compile a set of texts related to their topic.

In this lesson, students will explore ways an author's use of text structures convey meaning and the purpose of the text.

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In this lesson, students analyze and discuss familiar superheroes and super-villains to expand their understanding of character types and conventions. Then students consider social issues that confront their everyday reality and respond by incorporating those issues into the creation of their own superheroes or super-villains as well as the settings the superheroes or super-villains operate in.

Students will explore the Articles of Confederation and the Articles' influence in revising the Constitution of 1787. Students will experience the sentiments of Federalists and Anti Federalists by participating in a partner debate as either North Carolina Federalist James Iredell or Anti Federalist Willie Jones.

This lesson provides hands-on differentiated instruction by guiding students to search for the literal definitions of figurative language using the Internet. It also guides students in understanding figurative meanings through the use of context clues and making inferences.

Suggestions on how to guide students through the writing process when writing editorials "” from brainstorming a topic to publishing their work "” and all the steps in between.

Franklin R. Chang-Diaz is an immigrant from Costa Rica who began thinking about space at age seven when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space. After going through many obstacles he was accepted to NASA and became “the first Hispanic to be in the space program for the long run". In this CCSS lesson, students will explore his story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments; writing samples included.

Students will read scientific text about top predators in Arctic marine ecosystems and how they may be affected by global climate change. Students will work individually or collaboratively to write a report based on the scientific text they have read and participate in a large-group discussion session based on their analysis.