Students will work with the elements of argument and persuasion to understand the Declaration of Independence and then move into the diction used in the document and the power those words have.

A teaching resource for actiities, research assignments, writing prompts and cooperative activities for Ben Franklin including Poor Richard's Almanac.

Students will explore the Supreme Court case Board of Education v. Earls, in which high school sophomore Lindsay Earls challenged her school's drug testing policy. Students will watch a documentary on the case, apply the Fourth Amendment to the case, and further their understanding by participation in activities such as creating an anti-drug campaign and a moot court or mock trial.

This lesson focuses on the music through which those hardships were expressed and on the daily lives of southern blacks in the sharecropping era. It is structured around an imagined road trip through Mississippi. Students will "stop" in two places: Yazoo City, where they will learn about the sorts of natural disasters that periodically devastated already-struggling poor southerners, and Hillhouse, where they will learn about the institution of sharecropping. They will study a particular Country Blues song at each "stop" and examine it as a window onto the socioeconomic conditions of the people who created it. Students will create a scrapbook of their journey, in which they will record and analyze what they have learned about the difficulty of eking out a living in the age of sharecropping.

The repercussions of the Great Migration are far-reaching. Today, much of the restlessness and struggle that the Blues helped to articulate in the Migration era remains central in other forms of American music, including Hip Hop. In this lesson, students look to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as case studies that illustrate why African Americans left the South in record numbers and how communities came together in new urban environments, often around the sound of the Blues.

In this lesson, students will confirm, negate, and build information about the nation’s changing demographic using an organizational chart; write a letter to respond to a viewpoint offered in the central text; and talk about their own multiple identities in relation to those around them.

In this lesson, students will work in small groups to read and analyze a primary source using a set of questions designed to help them understand the writers' viewpoints. Students will then explain their findings to their classmates. Finally, each student will produce a written essay that explains how and why scientific understanding of the atom has changed over time.

Explore the events leading up to and beyond Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

In this minilesson, students first explore Dr. King's use of semicolons and their rhetorical significance. They then apply what they have learned by searching for ways to follow Dr. King's model and use the punctuation mark in their own writing.

Students will reflect on their reading experiences in and out of school and discuss the roles that both fiction and non-fiction played. Next, they will become familiar with what the Commmon Core Standards say about reading, and what critics and supporters have written in reaction. Ultimately, students will write about the question, "What should students read?"

This lesson connects The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier with several nonfiction texts, including the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

This lesson is the first of a two-part series focused on how scientists perform their work. These lessons make use of a book called The Frog Scientist, by Pamela S. Turner. Students will read the book and view and analyze supplemental resource materials to better understand how scientists are using the scientific method to study human environmental impact.

In this lesson, students will learn about the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery during the Civil Rights Movement. They will examine the Voting Rights of 1965 and watch clips from the movie Selma. Most importantly, students will think critically about sources of information.

This is an introductory lesson for any unit/text on the Holocaust. Students will first gallery walk various pictures, terms, and quotes about the Holocaust to connect with any previous knowledge and engage curiosity. The second activity asks the students to watch the National Holocaust Museum's movie about the events leading to the Holocaust. Finally students look closely at a text about the events leading up to Holocaust.

In this lesson, students discuss the meaning of “A More Perfect Union,” a speech about race made by then-Senator Barack Obama, during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign. Students will also examine and assess how textbooks position groups differently in our national historical narrative — and how this positioning affects our understanding of ourselves.

This set of lessons — comprised of five 45-minute sessions — will engage students in researching and understanding how individual Jewish communities and lives were affected by the Holocaust. By researching and analyzing family photographs, students will gain insight into the relative normalcy of Jewish life (religious, cultural, and business) before the Nazis assumed power — and then discover how Jewish lives changed drastically after the Nazi invasion

Speech writing is a rhetorical art and provides the content for these scaffolded lessons that support the increased cognitive rigor of literacy standards with presidential writings.

This resource includes a short quiz which focuses on Reading Informational standard 9. Students will read an excerpt from "The Gettysburg Address" and respond to three short questions.

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun provides a compelling and honest look into one family's aspirations to move to another Chicago neighborhood and the thunderous crash of a reality that raises questions about for whom the "American Dream" is accessible.

Students analyze parts of the previous iterations of the United States Constitution. Students will respond by using textual evidence. This activity may be used in conjunction with constructed response writing.