This resource accompanies our Rethink 7th Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 7th grade ELA content.

In this unit, students will be reading and writing myths following the structure of short stories and eventually publishing their own work.

Grouped by each state, by genre, or thematically, this resource has hundreds of folklores, fairy tales and fables for any age group.

 This is a hands-on project that uses George Orwell's novel, Animal Farm, as the touchstone text. Students work in groups to construct a functioning windmill that can generate electricity. Each student has a role based on the characters in the book. There are also segments of the project that focus on extracting key information from the text.

The purpose of this project is two-fold: first, to encourage students to make the reading of poetry a creative act; and, second, to help students appreciate particular literary devices in their functions as semaphores or interpretive signals. Those devices that are about the imagery of a poem (metaphor, simile, personification, description) can be thought of as magnifying glasses: we see most clearly that upon which the poet focuses our gaze. Similarly, those poetic devices that are about the sound of the poem (alliteration, consonance, enjambment, onomatopoeia, and repetition) can be thought of as volume buttons or amplifiers: we hear most clearly what the poet makes us listen to most attentively.

This is a poem about love that Poe has written in memory of his wife, whom he calls Annabel Lee. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

An interactive resource on annotating and close textual reading from Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave.

What drives changes to classic myths and fables? In this lesson students evaluate the changes Disney made to the myth of "Hercules" in order to achieve their audience and purpose.

Students use Shakespeare's Secret, a featured title on the Teachers' Choices Booklist (International Reading Association, 2006), as a springboard to exploration of the controversy regarding the authorship Shakespeare's works. The novel makes liberal use of the historical details surrounding William Shakespeare's life, and exposes students to the possibility raised by some theorists that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the works that have long been attributed to the Bard. Students explore the historical references in the novel and generate questions for further research. As they research these questions on suggested websites, they organize their findings with the help of the ReadWriteThink Notetaker. Then they work in small groups to create and present short dramatic skits that creatively connect the novel with the historical facts.

Students work in groups to read and discuss a book, keeping track of their feelings and opinions about the book, as well as facts and quotations, as they read. Students then decide which parts of their review they wish to annotate, with each student in the group responsible for one topic. Each student writes about his or her topic, including bibliographic information.

The Call of the Wild is a novel by American writer Jack London. The plot concerns a previously domesticated happy dog named Buck, whose primordial instincts return after a series of events leads to his serving as a sled dog in the Yukon during the 19th-century Klondike Gold Rush, in which sled dogs were bought at generous prices.

Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is London's most-read book, and it is generally considered his best, the masterpiece of his so-called "early period". Because the protagonist is a dog, it is sometimes classified as a juvenile novel, suitable for children, but it is dark in tone and contains numerous scenes of cruelty and violence.

London followed the book in 1906 with White Fang, a companion novel with many similar plot elements and themes as Call of the Wild, although following a mirror image plot in which a wild wolf becomes civilized by a mining expert from San Francisco named Weedon Scott.

Source: London, J. (1903). The Call of the Wild. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Students examine books, selected from the American Library Association Challenged/Banned Books list, and write persuasive pieces expressing their views about what should be done with the books at their school.

As the narrator sends her son Laurie off to kindergarten, she fears that her sweet child may be thrown out of school. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

A Christmas Carol is a Victorian morality tale that focuses on the life of the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge. First published by Charles Dickens in 1843 as a means to relieve personal debts, A Christmas Carol has become one of the most enduring Christmas stories of all time.

Source: Dickens, C. (1843). A Christmas Carol. London, England: Chapman and Hall.

Common Lit is a searchable collection of free fiction and nonfiction texts searchable by thematic connection, subject, discussion questions or text. Please note in order to access the entire site you will need to create a free account.

E-book readers, or digital readers, are devices that can host thousands of electronic books and allows readers to interact with digital texts through the use of e-book tools and features. In this lesson, students will read e-books and use digital tools (dictionaries and notes) to support their development of vocabulary. Specifically, students will assume roles of “word detectives” as they look up words in digital dictionaries and use other strategies to identify the meaning of vocabulary words.

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.

In this lesson students will identify the effective use of imagery and practice analyzing and creating imagery in particular selections.