This lesson reviews the literary devices at work in John Updike's "Ace in the Hole." Students consider professional athletes who didn't pan out before taking an in-depth look at Updike's techniques.

This packet of 41 short selections can be used regularly over the course of a school year to help students build fluency. There are enough passages to work on one per week - to two weeks. This source provides a protocol outlining strategies to engage students in short, daily fluency practice. Teachers can also send passages home for additional practice. To access the packet, select "View File" to download.

This packet is designed to strengthen the components of reading fluency: accuracy, rate, and prosody (expression). Students should understand what they are reading, thus embedded supports, such as student glossaries and ‘right there’ comprehension questions, are included. However, these passages are not intended for close reading or deep comprehension work.

Note for teachers of English Language Learners (ELLs): Regular fluency practice is essential for helping ELLs improve their overall literacy skills. Those acquiring a second language benefit especially from additional support with decoding, pronunciation, word identification, and prosody—all of which are the focus of regular fluency practice. Activities found in the Achieve the Core Fluency Packet reflect several best practices for English Language Learner instruction including:
• Having a text read aloud by a fluent reader prior to the student engaging with the text.
• Giving students multiple opportunities to hear the text read aloud by a fluent reader so that they can mirror the pronunciation and prosody of well-spoken English.
• Providing repeated opportunities for students to practice decoding skills both on their own and with support via active monitoring.
• Providing opportunities for students to learn new vocabulary through the use of student-friendly definitions, and to reinforce newly learned vocabulary through repeated practice with the same text and opportunities to use that vocabulary to respond to comprehension questions.
• Calling out work with “juicy sentences,” a strategy developed by Dr. Lily Wong Fillmore, that allows students to look deeply at word choice, sentence structure, and other text features that build their understanding of how English is used to convey different meanings.
• Providing numbered lines that allow students to quickly focus-in on specific sections of the text.
• Providing space for students to annotate the text with their own notes.

Informational paried passage mini-assessment that includes two articles and one accompanying recording, thirteen text-dependent questions (including one optional constructed-response prompt for students), and explanatory information for teachers regarding alignment to the CCSS. Articles included are “High Schools Starting Later to Help Sleepy Teens,” by Michelle Trudeau and “High schools will keep starting too early. Here’s why.” by Dan Weissmann

In this lesson, students conduct experiments and compile information into a research paper.

In this lesson, students read Pink and Say by Patricia Polacco to identify words that are unfamiliar to them. Working collaboratively in small groups, they discuss the meaning of these new words, using context clues from the text, prior knowledge, and both print and online resources. Students then apply their knowledge of the new vocabulary to further their understanding of the text.

This lesson employs direct instruction and small-group discussion to help students learn new vocabulary skills while reading Patricia Polacco?s Pink and Say.

This resource, which downloads directly, is a lesson plan to use with the book "Across the Wide Dark Sea" by Jean Van Leeuwen. "Across the Wide Dark Sea" is a realistic text about a boy and his family's nine-week journey and survival during the first winter at Plymouth. This text poetically narrates a young boy's account of risking the ocean ot find freedom in a new land.

In this lesson, students will write free-verse acrostic poems about themselves using the letters of their names to begin each line. They then write an additional acrostic poem about something that is important to them. After proofreading, both poems are recopied or typed and illustrated and then mounted on construction paper for display. Several opportunities for sharing and peer review are incorporated.

Using newspapers or magazines, students will create an acrostic poem where words are divided into parts of speech.

In this activity, students read a story and answer questions about the text. The resource contains guided reading and assessment questions.

Students participate in a fishbowl discussion about various legal situations related to the "age of responsibility" and contribute their ideas and arguments on the matter to a Learning Network Student Opinion blog post. This resource from the New York Times discusses what standard(s) society should use to determine when a youth should be treated as an adult.

Students can work together to brainstorm and create lists of verbs for each of the letters of the alphabet in this interactive activity. Then, choosing one verb for each letter, or letters of their choice, they can create pages for an Action Alphabet book. Each page includes an illustration and a sentence using the verb in context or students can create a chart with all of the verbs listed.

By "becoming" a character in a novel they have read and making lists from that character's perspective, students analyze the character while also enriching their vocabulary. Students gain a deeper understanding of a character by creating charts linking the character's actions with the character's traits. They explore adjectives through a variety of resources. They then use their analysis of the character and their knowledge of adjectives to create descriptive lists of their own three other characters from the novel.

Sstudents write the correct tense of each action verb to match the rest of each sentence.

In this lesson, students will evaluate speeches according to volume, stress, pacing, and pronunciation, and examine the importance of these values in delivering an oral presentation.

In this lesson, students will take their knowledge of how a position paper is constructed using reasons and evidence in order to plan their body paragraphs on the Planning My Body Paragraphs graphic organizer.

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.

In this activity, students watch a short clip from the ASHP documentary 1877: The Grand Army of Starvationto learn about the impact of railroad expansion on Americans and the nation as a whole. After watching the clip, students complete the “Technological Turning Points and their Impact” worksheet in order to examine the positive and negative effects of the railroad.