Students will determine central ideas on the concept of illiteracy and will cite several pieces of textual evidence to support their analysis. This lesson was developed by Kimm Murfitt as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.   It has been adapted to have a cultural lens using the lesson from Facing History and Ourselves to help set the stage for students to access the material and set the stage for why different cultures may approach literacy differently.      

Students will determine central ideas on the concept of illiteracy and will cite several pieces of text evidence to support their analysis. This lesson was developed by Kimm Murfitt as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.            

Students will read about Galileo and his amazing creation through this comprehension worksheet. During this sheet, students will analyze the text to respond to the open-ended question that is asked.

In this series of lessons, students read newspaper articles obtained from newspaper websites. Students then identify journalism's "5 Ws and 1 H" (who, what, when, where, why, and how) and complete a template with the corresponding information they have found in the article. Finally, students use their notes to write a 20-word summary called a GIST. Once students have mastered writing a GIST using newspaper articles, the strategy is then applied to content area texts to support comprehension and summarizing skills.

As background knowledge to Susan Pfeffer’s novels, The Dead and the Gone and Life as We Knew It, students research natural disasters for this lesson. In these two companion novels set in two different locations in the United States, the world’s environment has been changed because the moon has been pushed closer to the earth. This disturbance causes a series of natural disasters and epidemics. To fully understand the effects natural disasters have had on the world’s environment, each student researches a different natural disaster. Then they use these facts as well as safety tips in unique glogs, online interactive multimedia posters, that will include student-recorded weather announcements.

Making Evidence-Based Claims ELA/Literacy Units empower students with a critical reading and writing skill.
This unit develops students’ abilities to make evidence-based claims through activities based on a close reading of Cesar Chavez’s 1984 California Commonwealth Club Address.

In this lesson, students are introduced to the guiding question of Unit 2: Who changes working conditions? The students will think about this individually, in groups, and as a class.

In this lesson, students focus on Paragraphs 16–21 of Chavez's speech and how it contributes to his central claim.

In this lesson, students deepen their working concept of identity by exploring how gender expectations influence identity formation.

In this lesson, students begin to explore both ethnicity and sense of agency as aspects of identity.

In this lesson, students begin to explore the idea of self-worth as a facet of identity.

This lesson includes the End of Unit 1 Assessment. After the assessment, students refine and reflect their knowledge of identity by creating three more anchor charts that summarize their knowledge.

This is the first lesson in a full unit that scaffolds background knowledge, research skills, and note-taking toward a final written argument in which students will present a position on whether the American Academy of Pediatrics should increase its recent recommendation for screen time for children from two hours to four hours.

This lesson introduces the text The Big Thirst, which students will work with across Units 1 and 2.

These English Language Arts/Literacy Units empower students with critical reading and writing skills at the heart of the Common Core: analyzing and writing evidence-based arguments.

This unit develops students’ abilities to analyze arguments from a range of perspectives on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports. Students also learn to develop, write and revise their own evidence-based arguments.

This activity emphasizes the importance of teaching reading and writing strategies for students to use with informational text.

Students will explore the distinction between a hero and an idol. Based on collaboratively established criteria for heroism and characteristics of heroes, students will select, read about, and report on a hero. Students will identify how their hero matches their criteria and characteristics. Hero reports will be compiled into a class book. As a follow-up, the teacher will read aloud and lead a discussion of the poem Heroes We Never Name to emphasize the fact that there are heroes all around us. Students will write about a hero they know and describe this person's noble qualities and deeds.