Students are introduced to concepts of social justice, such as diversity, tolerance, equity, and equality, through a literary text, class discussions, and guided research. Students plan a service-learning project, then work in small groups using Photo Story software to produce a multimedia presentation designed to foster community support for the project. Students also use the ReadWriteThink.org Printing Press to create informational fliers about the project. The lesson concludes—and the service-learning project begins—with a showing of the Photo Story productions for parents and other community members.

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.

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 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.

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.

This lesson serves as the kickoff for Unit 3. This provides the teacher time to look over the draft end of unit assessments before handing them back to students with feedback in Lesson 17.

In this lesson, students will read for gist and gathering evidence using the research guide.

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.

In this lesson, students complete the Mid-Unit 3 Assessment Parts 1 and 2 using the concrete poem “Skateboard” from Technically, It’s Not My Fault and the news article “Councilman: Ban Skateboarding in Downtown Columbia.”