This resource accompanies our Rethink 7th Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 7th grade ELA content.

Informational paried passage mini-assessment that includes two articles and one accompanying recording, thirteen text-dependent questions (including one optional constructed-response prompt for students), and explanatory information for teachers regarding alignment to the CCSS. Articles included are “High Schools Starting Later to Help Sleepy Teens,” by Michelle Trudeau and “High schools will keep starting too early. Here’s why.” by Dan Weissmann

In this middle school lesson from Teaching Tolerance, students will explore the calendar to determine why different religions celebrate different holidays and establish what factors school and government leaders should consider when deciding whether public schools should be closed for religious holidays. Students will work in groups to create solutions for school calendars that respect all students and beliefs.

In this excerpt from Galarza’s memoir he recants his experiences in a new school in a new country, the United States. He describes learning a new language and being introduced to new cultures and people in his new country. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this memoir through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments. Printable text files included.

This resource is a collection of discussion questions and resoures to supplement Beacon Hills High, a story about an African American teenager's journey from Baltimore to Los Angeles and how she overcomes body-image, fame, cruel behavior and the other pressures of life.

Students use Shakespeare's Secret, a featured title on the Teachers' Choices Booklist (International Reading Association, 2006), as a springboard to exploration of the controversy regarding the authorship Shakespeare's works. The novel makes liberal use of the historical details surrounding William Shakespeare's life, and exposes students to the possibility raised by some theorists that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the works that have long been attributed to the Bard. Students explore the historical references in the novel and generate questions for further research. As they research these questions on suggested websites, they organize their findings with the help of the ReadWriteThink Notetaker. Then they work in small groups to create and present short dramatic skits that creatively connect the novel with the historical facts.

In this lesson, students will understand excerpts from an autobiographical work and retell scenes from the book. They will also collaborate to convert segments of the text into dialogue, creating a brief play about Susie King Taylor's involvement in the Civil War.

In this lesson, students perform a close reading of an informational text to learn about the history of the Blackstone Canal.

Students examine books, selected from the American Library Association Challenged/Banned Books list, and write persuasive pieces expressing their views about what should be done with the books at their school.

This lesson uses several strategies for scaffolding learning after reading a novel. The students work collaboratively to create Facebook profiles, Instagram profiles, plot diagrams and many other activities to evaluate their comprehension and analysis of a novel. This lesson gives students the opportunity to take charge of their learning by giving them choice.

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

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

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 brainstorm texts that they have read recently and map their choices using a Graphic Map to rate and make notes about them. Students then look for patterns connecting the texts that they enjoyed the most and those they enjoyed the least. Once they've analyzed their past readings, students complete a reading plan by first listing categories of books they want to read. They then use booklists, book reviews, and other resources to create a wish list of books they hope to read in the future.

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 introductory lesson, students engage in a hands-on, collaborative investigation of the definition of reading by participating in small group brainstorming sessions and an analysis of a variety of texts and the strategies they need to read them. Students also create individual Reader’s Profiles with an online tool modeled on social networking sites. Sharing these profiles and reflecting on their own learning, students ultimately develop a working definition of reading which they refine during the year.

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.

The content focus for this unit is getting students used to using and manipulating multiple media formats.  We will begin with exposure to multiple different formats, work with them to develop a working knowledge of the content, then move on into producing multimedia projects on their own. The first lesson introduces the topic and incorporates two different media formats. The second lesson incorporates infographics as another form of informational text. Students will produce a graphic organizer in this lesson to compare different types of media.  The last lesson has students pick a historical topic of their own to research, and produce a multimedia product in the form of a Merge cube visual.