Maine Content Literacy Project
The Process of Reading vocabulary, literary elements
Cover Freytag's Triangle and examine Anton Chekhov's "The Bet" in this third lesson plan in a series of fourteen based around short stories. Learners take a quiz and discuss Freytag's triangle. They apply the triangle to "The Bet" and...
Maine Content Literacy Project
Dramatic Structure of the Short Story
The second lesson in a series of fourteen, this plan takes the short story basics a step further. Learners complete a quiz about the story from the previous day, discuss the text, learn about Anton Chekhov, and work in groups to begin...
Maine Content Literacy Project
Introduction to the Short Story
How should pupils read short stories? Set them up for this unit with an introductory instructional activity that goes over the main characteristics of a short story and starts learners off reading their first short story of the unit. In...
Curated OER
Sophocles' Oedipus the King
Introduce your class to the Greek tragedy with a study of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Learners examine the features of a Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ achievements and contributions, and the universal themes that make the drama an enduring...
Curated OER
A High-Interest Novel Helps Struggling Readers Confront Bullying in Schools
Bully, bullied, or bystander? Paul Langan's The Bully is the anchor text in a unit that examines bullying and violence. After a close reading of the text, readers imagine themselves as the characters and consider how they would react in...
Prezi
Three Day Unit: Marigolds by Alison Buske on Prezi
Eugenia Collier's 1969 short story "Marigolds" and The Diary of Anne Frank provide the text for a consideration of experiences that cause the loss of childhood innocence and the development of compassion for others.
Torrey Maldonado
Anti-Bullying & Conflict-Resolution Lesson
Invite your class to consider how to respond to a conflict. Designed to be used alongside Secret Saturdays by Torrey Maldonado, a lesson plan focuses on a set of terms: conflict, escalate, deescalate, conflict resolution, denial, and...
National Endowment for the Arts
Teacher's Guide: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A 10-lesson unit takes high schoolers through a novel study of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. To start, students learn about Fitzgerald's background and gain historical context that prepares them for a reading of the book. The...
National Endowment for the Arts
Reader Resources: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A handy guide offers high schoolers support as they read the American novel, The Great Gatsby. Complete with a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a timeline of the Roaring Twenties, discussion questions about the novel, and more, this...
Polk Bros Foundation
Common Core Constructed Response Organizer
Get your writers ready to compose a constructed response essay in response to either an informational or fictional text. Pupils note down the big idea they wish to address as well as up to nine examples from the text that they wish to...
What So Proudly We Hail
The Meaning of America: National Identity and Why It Matters
Combining a close reading of a classic American text with the study of history can be a very powerful strategy, and this is most certainly the case with this resource using Edward Everett Hale's The Man without a Country. Consider themes...
National Endowment for the Humanities
Mark Twain and American Humor
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is famous, in part, because it established a uniquely American form of humor. For this famous story, Mark Twain combines the tall-tale, the dialect story, and satire. Here is a resource...
Curated OER
The Poetry Archive
Listening to poems about feeling lonely and feeling like an outsider set the stage for a group activity that focuses on Stevie Smith's "Not Waving But Drowning." Groups examine the three stanzas of Smith's poem separately and identify in...
Random House
Teacher's Guide: The Hobbit: The Enchanting Prelude to Lord of the Rings
The Odyssey, Star Wars, The Hunger Games. Odysseus, Luke Skywalker, Katniss Everdeen. Add The Hobbit and Bilbo Baggins to these lists, and you have a unit examining classic and contemporary myths, legends, and folktales with hero and...
What So Proudly We Hail
The Meaning of America: Freedom and Religion
The United States of America was founded on firm ideals of both the pursuit of happiness and a spirit of reverence. Through a close reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," you can examine what some consider was a...
What So Proudly We Hail
The Meaning of America: Equality
What if society sought equality by handicapping the gifted and dispelling any traces of diversity? Kurt Vonnegut Jr. offers one possible answer to this question through his incredibly engaging and thought-provoking satirical...
Shmoop
ELA.CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.2
Identifying the theme or central idea of a text is a skill many young readers struggle with. It is also the second standard for reading literature in the Common Core. This resource, one from a series of Common Core lessons, can provide...
Japan Society
Akutagawa Ryunosuke and the Taisho Modernists
Japan's Taisho Period was a time when authors like Akutagawa and other Japanese modernists began to experiment with point of view and literary form, making the literature produced during this time period a natural choice for teaching...
Japan Society
Changing Times, Changing Styles: New Japanese Literary Styles of the Late Nineteenth Century
Focusing on Doppo's "Unforgettable People" and late nineteenth century Japanese literature, this resource also leads to discussions of form being dictated by content. Explore the development of new literary styles first-hand by...
Pulitzer Center
"Voices from Haiti": Using Poetry to Speak up for a Cause
Explore a real world use of poetry with your class! Young language arts pupils consider the concept of advocacy and how journalism, photography, and poetry can raise awareness for a cause. They read several poems about individuals...
Curated OER
Setting Details in Of Mice and Men
After completing John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, groups are assigned a chapter to reread. Members list major conflicts and events and quote setting details. They then make observations about how the setting prepares the reader for the...
Curated OER
Exploring Contrasts in "The Lanyard" by Billy Collins
Middle schoolers analyze the speaker's ideas and tone in the Billy Collins poem "The Lanyard." After identifying how each of the five senses is addressed in the poem, they compare images to draw conclusions about the speaker and his...
Curated OER
Flying Freudian Fun: A Look At Ethical Decision Making
There are not many more apt examples of ethics gone awry than William Golding's Lord of the Flies.. Ninth graders focus the ethics of decision making with the examples provided in the plot. They focus on the concept of the psyche and how...
Curated OER
The Red Badge of Courage: A New Kind of Realism
Is it possible to tell a true war story? Tim O’Brien says that fiction is for “getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” To get at the truth about war, class members examine primary source materials from the...