This lesson plan, intended for use in the teaching of world history in the middle grades, is designed to help students appreciate the parallel development and increasing complexity of writing and civilization in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in ancient Mesopotamia.

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 activity, students use primary source documents in order to assess the validity of this statement: "British colonial and North American perceptions of each other created exonomic cooperation and social friction between the two groups prior to the American Revolution." Students will write an essay based on their analysis of the documents.

Working in small groups, students will work produce sections of an historical newspaper or journal for publication in democratic Athens. Using the resources of this Web site (as well as books and other resources listed in the Research Links & Resources Page) pick an approximate date and research stories for your newspaper. This section has been tailored for a newspaper about Athens during the time of Pericles, because of the greater amount of information available for that period. However, with some adaptation and additional research it would be possible to compile newspapers for early or later periods.

Students will view a reality television episode and read a news article related to reality television. Then students will complete a graphic organizer to create an argument for or against children participating in reality television. Students will apply supportive details for writing a persuasive paragraph.

In this activity, students consider arguments for and against unrestricted immigration during the Ellis Island era. Students analyze political cartoons, letters, newspaper articles, posters, and other sources, noting evidence in the documents to support the viewpoints of the various figures in the 1903 cartoon "The Immigrant." This activity also includes modifications for low-level readers.

This unit is designed to teach about the causes and effects of the Great Depression, and provide an introduction to the use of primary sources in the study of history. This historical discovery approach will emphasize the role of the historian as detective using such skills as observation, discrimination, analysis, and synthesis to research and record history. Students will explore primary sources including photographs, poems, song lyrics, documents, maps, cartoons, as well as, secondary source texts in print and online.

In this lesson, students use online sites to find primary sources from the period. They will then work collaboratively to analyze the primary sources they find and present their analysis to the class.

In this lesson students develop skills in Internet searching, skimming, and scanning through teacher modeling, think-alouds, and think-pair-share. Students begin with a discussion and demonstration of skimming and scanning to find information on the Internet. Through a teacher-modeled activity, students learn how to use appropriate key terms to yield a manageable number of resources. Students then divide into groups of two to complete a bingo game, and during the course of the game, students will search a website to fill in a bingo board. A sample bingo board focusing on ancient Greece and Rome is included, but additional content area-related goals may be incorporated by changing the questions on the bingo board to match a particular topic.

In this lesson, students learn about the draft lottery during the Vietnam War, and how it affected the lives of young men during that time. Students are introduced to the Selective Service’s lottery system through a bell-ringer that asks them to locate their “number” and then segregates the class into the drafted and undrafted. They then read a short description of the Selective Service’s lottery system. The key points from the reading are summarized through a teacher-directed discussion. Finally, students view the oral histories of veterans who discuss the ways the draft impacted their perspectives on the Vietnam War.

E-book readers, or digital readers, are devices that can host thousands of electronic books and allows readers to interact with digital texts through the use of e-book tools and features. In this lesson, students will read e-books and use digital tools (dictionaries and notes) to support their development of vocabulary. Specifically, students will assume roles of “word detectives” as they look up words in digital dictionaries and use other strategies to identify the meaning of vocabulary words.

Students will become engaged learners through this unit that prepares students for studying ancient Greece with digital storytelling skills. First students develop a list of questions to research Greek gods, heroes, and creatures. Then with a partner, they choose the topic of their research and divide the questions between themselves. After conducting research, the partners write scripts for their digital story using the online tool PowToon.

This lesson was designed to help students gain social studies/history content knowledge by using textual evidence to answer text-dependent questions.

This lesson and resource uses point-by-point arguments to help students develop higher order thinking skills by learning to distinguish fact from opinion.

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 CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

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. 

This resource is a nonfiction, Common Core aligned reading passage with textual analysis questions about main idea and textual support.

A guideline for teachers to compare the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce and discuss how their narration choices affect the piece and the reader.

In this lesson, students engage in a close reading of Hopper's painting and an Edward Hirsch poem to explore the types of emotion generated by each work in the viewer or reader, and how the painter and poet each achieved these responses.