This recurring lesson encourages students to comprehend their reading through inquiry and collaboration. They work independently to choose quotations that exemplify the main idea of the text, come to a consensus about those quotations in collaborative groups, then formulate "quiz" questions about their reading that other groups will answer.

After taking a virtual tour of the Globe Theater in Elizabethan London, students use graphic organizers to compare attending a performance at the Globe to attending a Broadway play or movie. Then they work collaboratively to create a commercial advertisement geared towards an Elizabethan audience.

After gaining skill through anazlying a historic and contemporary speech as a class, students will select a famous speech from a list (included) and write an essay that identifies and explains the rhetorical strategies that the author chose while crafting an effective speech. The analysis will consider questions such as: What makes a good argument? How did the author's rhetoric evoke a response from the audience? Why are the words still famous today?

In this lesson students learn to evaluate political cartoons for their meaning, message, and persuasiveness. Students first develop critical questions about political cartoons. Then they access an online activity to learn about artistic techniques cartoonists frequently use. Finally, students will work in small groups to analyze a political cartoon.

Surveys are an important tool when doing research and learning to evaluate information. In this lesson, students consider the purpose and meaning of surveys, learn what types of questions are asked, evaluate the validity of a specific survey, and write in their journals to reflect what they have learned.

This page contains a teacher's guide for Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. The guide includes background information on the time period and on Anne Frank's life, prompts for writing and discussion, vocabulary words, and supplemental information and resources to extend knowledge of World War 2 and the Holocaust and their timelines.

This page contains notes on Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, with strategies for approach, lesson ideas, suggestions for discussion and projects, and ways to tie the content to modern day issues.

Students will evaulate a nonfiction or realistic text for its cultural relevance to themselves and as a group. Then they analyze the cultural relevance of a selected text using an online tool. After, students search for additional relevant texts; each chooses one and writes a review of the text that they choose.

This resource for "Letter One" from Letters to a Young Poet focuses on how to craft a formal, multi-paragraph essay on how word choice impacts meaning and tone.

This self-study guide from the University of Washington offers well organized resources on the topic of Indian education in the United States from the late 19th- early 20th centuries. The collection provides an overview, followed by detailed readings and images. Sections of the self-study: Part 1: Indian Boarding School Movement Part 2: Mission Schools Part 3: Boarding Schools Part 4: A Typical Daily Schedule Part 5: Negatives and Positives Part 6: Sample Daily Routine

This lesson asks students to keep a daily diary that records how and when they listen to radio, music, and other streaming media. Students then analyze the details and compare their results to published reports on American radio listeners. They conclude by reflecting on their findings and writing a final statement on their audio literacy practices and interests.

In this lesson students will learn about Henry Ford, whose innovations transformed manufacturing and made automobiles affordable for virtually all Americans. Second, students think about the different ways in which the automobile changed American society. Objectives 1.To introduce students to the technological innovations that contributed to mass production of the automobile. 2.To show how mass production allows large numbers of Americans to afford an automobile. 3.To demonstrate the short- and long-term cultural effects of widespread automobile ownership on the United States.

This mini-assessment asks students to read a text and view a short video, then answer text-dependent questions about them. Also included is an optional constructed-response prompt for the students.

This lesson is designed to help students prepare to read a historical novel. Students are required to complete research pertaining to the work's setting, time-period or decade. Afterwards, students use the online site and software, Prezi, to communicate and share their findings.

In this lesson, students will listen to examples of love songs from several musical styles and historical moments. The activities are designed to explore how music and lyrics work together to express different sentiments toward love and relationships.

After reading a play, students create a resume for one of the characters. Students first discuss what they know about resumes, then select a character from the play to focus on. Next, they search online for historical background information. Using supporting details from the play, students then draft resumes for their characters and search a job listing site for which their character is qualitfied.

After reading books, students share book talks through digital storytelling. First, students plan scripts and then find images to illustrate their scripts. They also add text, narration, music as well as pan and zoom effects. Finally, the joy of reading is prompted through the sharing of the students' digital stories.

Teachers generally warn student writers to avoid sentence fragments but professional writers use sentence fragments effectively for a variety of reasons. Using Edgar Schuster's study of sentence fragments from "The Best American Essays," this lesson encourages students to examine fragments in action, determine their effective rhetorical uses, and reflect on their own uses of sentence fragments.

This brochure assignment teaches how shifting purposes and audiences can create change in a student’s writing. After exploring published brochures, students determine key questions, research a topic and work through the writing process to create their own informative brochure complete with visuals.

This lesson highlights the changing relationship between the city center and the suburb in the postwar decades, especially in the 1950s. Students will look at the legislation leading up to and including the Federal Highway Act of 1956. They will also examine documents about the history of Levittown, the most famous and most important of the postwar suburban planned developments.