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Pulitzer Center

"Voices from Haiti": Using Poetry to Speak up for a Cause

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
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...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Self-Monitoring Strategies and Vocabulary Games

For Teachers 8th - 12th Standards
Middle and high schoolers identify how to discover a word's meaning by exploring context clues and any pictures, diagrams, photographs, and charts that might be included. They continue this process with other examples and locate one on...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

"Shooting an Elephant"

For Teachers 9th - 11th Standards
Study selected vocabulary terms in George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant." A chart includes five selections, and learners must record the connotative and denotative meaning for each. A great look at using the context to define vocabulary...
Lesson Plan
National Endowment for the Humanities

Tales of the Supernatural

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
Scary stuff! Whether approached as the first horror story or a "serious imaginative exploration of the human condition," Frankenstein continues to engage readers. Here's a packet of activities that uses Mary Shelley's gothic...
Lesson Plan
National Endowment for the Humanities

The Beauty of Anglo-Saxon Poetry: A Prelude to Beowulf

For Teachers 9th - Higher Ed Standards
Riddle me this! What do kennings, caesura, and alliteration have to do with the Nowell Codex? Introduce class members to Anglo-Saxon poetry and prepare readers for a study of Beowulf with a series of activities that...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

The Red Badge of Courage: A New Kind of Realism

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
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...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Shizuko’s Daughter: Knowledge Rating Scale

For Teachers 7th - 12th Standards
How well do your kids know key terms from Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori? Have them review a list of words that they will encounter in the novel, and mark which words they know well, which words they've seen before, and which...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Shizuko’s Daughter: List-Group-Label Strategy

For Teachers 7th - 12th Standards
Help your learners navigate the vocabulary of Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori with a lesson on categorizing words. After coming up with a list of things that grow from the earth, learners decide which categories each words belong in.
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Shizuko’s Daughter: Before, During, After Lesson Plan

For Teachers 7th - 12th Standards
Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori presents a vivid picture of Japanese culture and history. As kids read through the third chapter, they find novel-specific vocabulary to enhance their understanding and use context clues to...
Lesson Plan
Poetry Internation Volume 17, 2011

Alliteration, Consonance, and Assonance in Poetry

For Teachers 11th - 12th Standards
Three poems, “Under the Mangoes” by Jacqueline Bishop, Eleanor Wilner’s “What It Hinges On,” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” provide the text for an examination of alliteration, consonance, and assonance. After...
Activity
Shmoop

ELA.CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.4

For Teachers 11th - 12th Standards
Your assessment is to figure out if I am being figurative or connotative with this statement: This is a great resource. Can’t do it? Then you had better review how to break down Common Core skill RL.11-12.4. In simple language that you...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: A Novel

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
Jamie Ford’s historical novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, explores the relationship between a young Chinese American boy and a Japanese American girl set against the backdrop of Seattle during World War II. The teaching...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Famous Death Lines

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
High schoolers examine Shakespeare's language. They select and explore death scenes from plays that they're familiar with and practice delivering famous death lines to one another. They should attempt to recreate the emotions that they...
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National Endowment for the Humanities

Thirteen Ways of Reading a Modernist Poem

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
High schoolers analyze modernist poetry and the role of speaker in example poems. Learners study modernist poems from the Romanticism and Victorian periods as well as Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Using a...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

For Teachers 11th - 12th Standards
"People Everyday" offers class members an opportunity to develop their literacy analysis skills and to develop media literacy. Guided by an included list of discussion questions, groups examaine the word choice, literary devices used,...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Creating Dramatic Monologues from The Grapes of Wrath

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
The characters in The Grapes of Wrath come to life through an activity that asks groups to craft a dramatic monologue for a character in John Steinbeck's National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning novel.  Writers are...
Lesson Plan
National Endowment for the Humanities

Charles Baudelaire: Poète Maudit (The Cursed Poet)

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
After learning the main ideas of the Decadent movement, students work in small groups to read and translate poems by the French poet Charles Baudelaire using basic etymology skills. They then read the accurate English translations to see...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Shakespeare's Macbeth: Fear and Motives of Evil

For Teachers 10th - Higher Ed Standards
Students complete play and vocabulary analysis for William Shakespeare's Macbeth. In this Macbeth analysis lesson, students use an online research engine to locate passages that highlight Macbeth's response to fear and his descent into...
Lesson Plan
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Curated OER

Create a Video Poem

For Teachers 4th - 12th Standards
Collaborate to create a visual version of a poem using video. Before class, choose a poem to pick apart. Read it aloud and then analyze it in detail as a class. Assign a line or short section to each student to expand upon using a...
Lesson Plan
Curated OER

"Tear him for his bad verses:" Cinna the poet and Shakespeare's Sonnets

For Teachers 10th Standards
Poor Cinna, the poet. His dream of “things unlucky” certainly comes true as the mob tears him apart, at first because they mistake him for Cinna, the conspirator, and then continue to “tear him to pieces for his bad verses.” As part of...
Handout
Georgia Department of Education

Ga Virtual Learning: Poetic Devices [Pdf]

For Students 9th - 10th Standards
This is a nine-page PDF on poetic devices; it includes four sections: The Sounds of Words, The Meanings of Words, Arranging the Words, and The Images of Words. Each section includes the poetic devices that fit the topic complete with...
Handout
Other

The University of Wales: Semiotics for Beginners

For Students 9th - 10th Standards
Click on Denotation, Connotation, and Myth. A discourse in the use of "denotation" and "connotation" as they refer to semiotics and cultural myths.
Handout
Sophia Learning

Sophia: Common Words With Multiple Meanings

For Students 9th - 10th Standards
This lesson explains common words with multiple meanings: some similar and some very different meanings and the impact of parts of speech on meaning. It discusses six common words with their multiple meanings and different parts of...
Handout
Sophia Learning

Sophia: Diction

For Students 9th - 10th Standards
This lesson uses text and an accompanying audio to discuss diction including its definition, what it includes, and an explanation and an example of how word choice, word order, and phrasing can change the tone of writing.