Joseph Bruchac's Code Talker tells the remarkable story of Navajo Marines' role in battles of the Pacific Theater during World War II. As scholars read the novel, they also engage in activities that expand their knowledge of Navajo...

Frequently banned, often challenged, a mainstay of middle school curriculum, Tales from the Secret Annex, is the featured text in the seventh unit in the Teacher Guide Core Knowledge Program. The 134-page guide includes an introduction,...

Introduce your seventh graders to the Harlem Renaissance with a unit that explores this dynamic period's music, literature, and ideas. The 160-page guide includes a unit calendar, an introduction to the unit, 10 richly detailed lessons...

Seventh graders have a golden opportunity to learn how to read poems and short stories with a unit that introduces them to the techniques writers use to craft their works. They examine poems by William Carlos Williams and Edgar Allen Poe...

Lead your readers into the fourth dimension as time travelers with a Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) Teacher Guide of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. The 144-page guide includes a unit calendar, introduction, nine lessons, teacher...

The Core Knowledge Foundation offers this teacher guide to Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic novel about the duality of humankind. The 128-page guide includes a unit introduction, unit calendar, nine scripted lesson plans, assessments with...

Massive storms, shipwrecks, survivors stranded on an island ruled by an aging magician, and strange creatures—Shakespeare's The Tempest appeals to today's middle schoolers. For this unit, seventh graders read selections from an adapted...

Erin Entrada Kelly's award-winning novel, Hello, Universe is the anchor text in this 236-page teacher guide. The guide includes introductions to the Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) program and the unit, a unit calendar, 12 lessons...

C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia is about far more than the adventures of a group of children in an imaginary kingdom. Find out what else it's about in a short Great American Read video.

Looking for Alaska is the subject of a short PBS video that encourages viewers to read John Green's award-winning young adult novel about first love. 

Published in 1813 and considered by many to be the first romance novel, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice still tops the chart as a favorite read. Literary experts share why the tale of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy continues to win the...

Douglas Adams' hysterical send-up of bureaucratic thinking, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is the focus of a Great American Read video that urges viewers to vote for one of the greatest satires since Gulliver's Travels.

Rather than windmills, Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces, battles against modernity. Find out why Professor Walter Isaacson thinks Toole's novel should get viewers' votes...

Ready Player One has been praised as a novel that captures the vitality, the allure, and the essence of the virtual reality experience. Speakers in a short video share their rationale for why Ernest Clines' dystopian novel should be...

Reverend Katrina Foster offers her rationale for why Winston Smith, the tragic hero of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, is her favorite literary character.

Jack London's books feature male characters, but that doesn't mean they're just for boys! Chelsea Clinton and Shanna Peeples discuss the underlying messages of love and sacrifice in The Call of the Wild, as well as the conflict of man...

Who are we and what shapes our identities? Seventh graders work to answer this question as they learn how to write a memoir. Full of non-print resources and supplemental texts that range from fiction to non-fiction, scholars write their...

Readers take the main characters in Matilda and individually describe them through a mnemonic. To get there, group members create an acrostic poem describing the character they were given, and choose one of the words from the acrostic...

What a neat interactive that interacts with the amount of water on Earth's surface. It begins with a brief audio introduction of the Blue Planet and how it got its name. Then, users click on the activity to play a game that calculates...

Track your class's progress on all of the ELA Common Core standards with these handy charts. Along the left side, each seventh grade identifier is listed along with the full text of the standard. As you teach, reteach, assess, and...

Support vocabulary instruction for any unit with this quick exercise. Class members write down the word, part of speech, and definition. They compose an original sentence using the word, and draw a picture of the word. Four words fit on...

Introduce your class to Edgar Allan Poe with a series of mostly self-guided tasks and assignments. Class members follow the list of tasks, starting by watching a video with background information and ending with a compare-and-contrast...

These two worksheets cover several grammatical topics. Pupils work on words with multiple meanings, Greek and Latin word parts, word connotations, academic language, and more. The result is seven quick exercises that could be used...

Here’s a template that asks users to record the part of speech, a definition, craft a showing sentence, and add or draw a picture of four vocabulary words--rubber, climate, realize, situation.