Studying the influence of mass media on our lives allows students to view advertising in a new light. This lesson provides students with the opportunity to look at mass media in a critical way. Students become aware of the tremendous amount of advertising that they are exposed to on a daily basis. By looking at advertising critically, students begin to understand how the media oppresses certain groups, convinces people to purchase certain products, and influences culture.

This lesson plan, intended for use in the teaching of world history in the middle grades, is designed to help students appreciate the parallel development and increasing complexity of writing and civilization in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in ancient Mesopotamia.

The following unit incorporates multimedia and classroom activities to encourage students to explore and interact with poetry by first writing letters to important historical poets as practice for writing letters to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors, a group that represents poetry in America at its best.

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.

Students read and discuss the Founding Fathers of our country indulgence in gripe sessions. In fact, a list of grievances comprises the longest section of the Declaration of Independence; however, the source of the document's power is its firm philosophic foundation. You can capitalize on the inclination of your students to complain to increase student awareness of the precedents behind the Declaration of Independence. Students will summarize the contributions of the "Founding Fathers" to the development of our county as well as explain how key historical figures exemplified values of American democracy.

In this lesson, students brainstorm texts that they have read recently and map their choices using a Graphic Map to rate and make notes about them. Students then look for patterns connecting the texts that they enjoyed the most and those they enjoyed the least. Once they've analyzed their past readings, students complete a reading plan by first listing categories of books they want to read. They then use booklists, book reviews, and other resources to create a wish list of books they hope to read in the future.

In this introductory lesson, students engage in a hands-on, collaborative investigation of the definition of reading by participating in small group brainstorming sessions and an analysis of a variety of texts and the strategies they need to read them. Students also create individual Reader’s Profiles with an online tool modeled on social networking sites. Sharing these profiles and reflecting on their own learning, students ultimately develop a working definition of reading which they refine during the year.

In this lesson, students create text sets and use them to practice three strategies for reading for information. Students select a topic they want to explore and work in small groups to compile a set of texts related to their topic.

In this lesson, students participate in a Socratic seminar discussing a person's right to refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

6th grade students were introduced to hardships around the world through literature. Students selected a topic they were interested in and researched that topic. Then they collaborated with a team of peers and created a tri-fold poster board display about their topic. These were displayed in the media center and parents and other classes were invited to come in. The guests of the exposition were encouraged to ask the teams questions about their topics, allowing the students to further demonstrate the knowledge and passion they had for their topic. The guests also voted on the teams that had the best information and the most knowledge about their topic.

In this lesson, students prepare for their performance task, their own hero's journey narrative, by revisiting the informational text, The Hero's Journey and using it to deconstruct the hero's journey of the main character in The Lightning Thief.

In this lesson students analyze a model narrative and begin planning their own narratives.

This is the second of the two-lesson cycle started in Lesson 6 that will be repeated until students have finished closely reading all of the Steve Jobs commencement speech. In this lesson, students dig deeper into paragraphs 6–8 in order to answer text-dependent questions.

In this lesson, students examine modern voices of adversity expressed through different genres in preparation for sharing their own voice by writing a monologue.

In this lesson, students continue to build on the skills of citing evidence to analyze what is being expressed and using it to make inferences from concrete poems in Blue Lipstick and Technically, It’s Not My Fault.

In this lesson, students continue to contribute new challenges to the Challenges of Modern Times anchor chart.

This lesson begins with students rereading the concrete poem “The Thank-You Letter” from Technically, It’s Not My Fault. After reading the poem, they listen to its audio version and compare the two experiences.