By examining Lincoln's three most famous speeches the Gettysburg Address and the First and Second Inaugural Addresses in addition to a little known fragment on the Constitution, union, and liberty, students trace what these documents say regarding the significance of union to the prospects for American self-government.

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.

This resource includes an extended lesson designed to help students engage with ideals relative to the “American Dream”. The lesson is largely designed to accompany a reading of the novel The Great Gatsby. Students will read articles that discuss the “American Dream” prior to writing their own argumentative essay.

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 will use multiple texts in order to analyze how central ideas are developed across texts.

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 analyze the argumentative structure employed by Robert Lake (Medicine Grizzlybear) in his essay "Indian Father's Plea." There are three versions with varying levels of support.

In Lesson 5 (pages 88-91 of the pdf) from the unit Argumentative Writing and Research, students will focus on how writers evaluate and rank their claims in order to structure and create strong argumentative paragraphs.

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 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 plan, students will learn how to critique nonfiction texts, focusing on how to determine bias and how to identify an author's purpose in a text.

On March 1, 1896, a massive Ethiopian army routed Italian forces at the Battle of Adwa. The battle marked the largest military triumph of an African state over a European army in the 19th century and helped Ethiopia retain its independence during Europe's "scramble for Africa." In this lesson students read three different textbook accounts of the battle - two American and one Ethiopian - to investigate the question: How did Ethiopia defeat Italy at the Battle of Adwa?

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 investigate how teenagers became a distinct demographic group with its own identity in the postwar years, and, in turn, how their influence helped push Rock and Roll into the mainstream. In so doing, they helped secure Rock and Roll's place as the most important popular music of the 20th century.

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.