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Lesson Plan
K20 LEARN

Watch Your Tone: Tone Analysis Through Music And Nonfiction

For Teachers 10th - 11th
Identifying the tone of a piece of writing or the author's attitude toward the subject matter can be difficult for learners. Simplify the process with a lesson that begins with skits, moves to songs and their lyrics, and then to passages...
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Unit Plan
Mr. Ambrose

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

For Teachers 11th - 12th Standards
Good discussion questions, quizzes, and tests teach as well as assess. Readers of The Great Gatsby will learn much from the materials in a 36-page packet designed to help students prepare for the AP Literature exam. Included in the...
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Lesson Plan
2
2
Star Wars in the Classroom

"Shakespeare and Star Wars": Lesson Plan Day 1

For Teachers 6th - 12th Standards
"Now is the summer of our happiness/Made winter by this sudden, fierce attack!" Luke Skywalker meets Hamlet in a 10-lesson unit based on Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope. Using Star Wars® as source...
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Lesson Plan
2
2
Student Achievement Partners

"The Glorious Whitewasher" from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain with Mini-Assessment

For Teachers 6th - 8th Standards
It's the classic scene: Tom Sawyer is whitewashing a fence. Expose your learners to Mark Twain's humor while reinforcing reading comprehension. Eighth graders are encouraged to read and reread, achieving as much exposure to the text as...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Back to School: Style Analysis

For Teachers 9th - 12th
Jump back into expository writing and analysis at the start of a new school year! Start with a review of an authors' stylistic choices in diction, syntax, treatment of subject matter, and figurative language. Writers choose a text to...
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Handout
San José State University

Parallelism

For Students 9th - 12th Standards
What is parallelism? Novice writers learn about parallelism and practice balancing 10 sentences for better syntax and parallel structure. A clear, straightforward learning exercise with answers included.
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Lesson Plan
K20 Learn

Annotating a Text: Style and Syntax

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
If you have a favorite author, you probably recognize their style. Conduct a close read of the text, marking it up as they go. Collaborative sharing time and a summary writing prompt follow the main activity.
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Interactive
Texas Education Agency (TEA)

Syntax (English II Reading)

For Students 10th
Lesson five in the series focuses on syntax and the elements that make sentences enjoyable. Learners practice building different clauses and phrases and using figures of speech and rhetorical and literary devices.
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Lesson Plan
K20 LEARN

Sentence Structure in Siddhartha: Simple, Compound, Complex, and Compound-Complex Sentences

For Teachers 9th Standards
While wisdom may not be communicated, knowledge of sentence structures certainly can. Teach young grammarians the power of syntax with a instructional activity that uses Herman Hesse's Siddhartha as a mentor text. Learners first rewrite...
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Lesson Plan
K20 LEARN

Say It with Style: Syntax and Parallel Structure

For Teachers 9th Standards
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech provides the text for a lesson that introduces scholars to the significance of syntax. After examining several types of clauses, phrases, and structures, class members use the...
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Lesson Plan
ReadWriteThink

What is Poetry? Contrasting Poetry and Prose

For Teachers 6th - 8th Standards
Introduce middle schoolers to the different strategies used when reading prose versus poetry. Groups use a Venn diagram and a poetry analysis handout to compare the characteristics of an informational text and a  poem on the same subject...
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Lesson Plan
Newseum

Bias Through History: Analyzing Historical Sources

For Teachers 6th - 12th Standards
Young journalists use the E.S.C.A.P.E. (evidence, source, context, audience, purpose, and execution) strategy to evaluate historical and contemporary examples of bias in the news. The class then uses the provided discussion questions to...
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Lesson Plan
1
1
National Endowment for the Humanities

Language Analysis Based on Stave 1

For Teachers 6th - 12th Standards
Class members meet the original scrooge, the Dickens character whose name has become synonymous with a cold-hearted, tight-fisted, miser. Using the provided worksheet, readers closely examine context clues to determine the meanings of...
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Activity
1
1
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum

Pearl Harbor Activity #2: Why Do Words Matter?

For Teachers 6th - 12th
Words matter! That's the big idea behind an activity that asks scholars to replace words in FDR's "Day of Infamy" speech with synonyms. They then listen to a recording of President Roosevelt's address and compare his version to their own.
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Unit Plan
Simon & Schuster

Curriculum Guide to: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

For Teachers 6th - 12th Standards
Five lessons make up a curriculum guide to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Readers find examples of Twain's use of irony, closely examine Huck's colloquial language, as well as his sense of morality, and identify themes in the novel....
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Unit Plan
Simon & Schuster

Curriculum Guide to: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
A Tale of Two Cities is the core text for five lessons in a Curriculum Guide for Charles Dickens' famous novel. To begin, scholars examine Dickens' use of anaphora in the first line of the novel. Next, they compare the point of view in a...
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Activity
Digital Public Library of America

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
Are you contemplating a poetry study featuring Emily Dickinson? Finding good primary sources to accompany the study can be a challenge—never fear, help is here! Check out this primary source set that includes manuscripts of several of...
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Lesson Plan
PBS

Their Eyes Were Watching God: The Impact of Language

For Teachers 10th - Higher Ed Standards
Author, filmmaker, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was also a dialectologist. The dialogue of the characters in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God reveals her fascination with accents and dialects. A short video from the Great...
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Unit Plan
Pearson

Langston Hughes

For Students 7th Standards
An author study provides learners the opportunity to explore in depth the life of, the influences on, and the works of a single literary figure. Introduce middle schoolers to Langston Hughes with a unit that models how to approach an...
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Lesson Plan
Lafayette Parrish School System

Teaching Tone and Mood

For Teachers 6th - 8th Standards
Tone and Mood are not synonymous! Introduce young readers to these literary devices with a series of exercises that not only point out the significant differences between the terms but also shows them how to identify both the tone and...
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Handout
Deer Valley Unified School District

Close Reading: Analyzing Mood and Tone

For Students 9th - 12th
The AP Literature and Composition exam is all about close reading. Test takers are presented with a passage and asked to analyze how an author uses literary devices to create a desired effect. Prepare your students for the exam with a...
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PPT
1
1
District 186 Springfield Public Schools

Tone, Mood, Theme, and Motif

For Students 9th - 12th Standards
It's all well and good when you're asked to identify a speaker's tone using his or her body language, facial expression, and pitch and emphasis. Identifying the tone of a written passage is another challenge entirely. Check out an...
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Activity
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway

For Students 9th - 12th Standards
Accompany a reading of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea with a thorough literature packet. Although the materials are meant to prepare readers for a timed essay, the background information and the activities are sure to engage...
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Grade 9 ELA Module 4, Unit 1, Lesson 20

For Teachers 9th Standards
After comparing the working conditions of the enslaved people to those of the Indian indentured workers on the sugar plantations, class members examine the conditions and the actions of specific historical figures that Marc Aronson and...