Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) is a technique that teaches students to work cooperatively on a reading assignment to promote better comprehension. CSR learning logs are used to help students keep track of learning during the collaboration process. Students think about what they are reading and write down questions/reflections about their learning. The completed logs then provide a guide for follow-up activities and evaluation methods.

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

Students share opinions about the tone and content of two commercials presented during the Super Bowl.They then work with a partner to critique a commercial from a past Super Bowl, and then assess the commercials that run during a half-hour television show.

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

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 read two descriptions of Earth's interior structure and summarize similarities and differences between the two and answer a series on analysis questions.

A concept map help students visualize various connections between words or phrases and a main idea. There are several types of concept maps; some are hierarchical, while others connect information without categorizing ideas. Most are comprised of words or phrases surrounded by a circle or square that connect to one another and ultimately back to the main idea through graphic lines. These lines help students to "negotiate meaning" as they read and make the meaning connections between the main idea and other information.

In this activity, students analyze primary source documents in order to better understand the content, impact, and perpetual relevance of the U.S. Constitution to the daily lives of American citizens.

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.

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.

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.

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

Students will read text (short story, poem, chapters of a book) and create a comic strip summarizing what they have read. Students will record themselves reading pieces of the summary for each box of the comic strip and create QR codes for each box.

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.

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