How would you spend your last days with a loved one? The movie guide for The Fault in Our Stars prompts scholars to compare important scenes from the novel to the film and contains background information about the author, guided...

Use art museum paintings as inspiration for your class's creative writing works. Observing the paintings closely, middle and high schoolers list details and write descriptions. Their completed stories are displayed on bulletin boards...

S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders is well known for its relatable characters and plot, but don't forget how effective the book's figurative language can be! Check out an interactive resource that explores how figurative language comes...

Review word choice and grammar skills with this practice test for the Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT). Fifteen multiple-choice questions prompt eighth graders to recall writing strategies, grammar skills, and...

Use short stories to teach English? Yes! Designed as a professional development opportunity for English language teachers, the ideas in this booklet can easily be adapted to advanced ESL/ELL classes.

Explore figurative language with your secondary class. Extending a language arts unit, the lesson prompts middle schoolers to examine how an author's word choice establishes a story's tone, possibly using metaphors, similes,...

Play a figurative language game! Starting with a review of terms, this presentation quickly launches into a quiz game with hyper-linked answers. Simply click an answer to find out if it's wrong or right. The option to try again is always...

Augment your eighth grade language arts curriculum with a thorough set of reading comprehension activities and assessments. Focusing on a variety of skills, including vocabulary in context, text structure, main idea, and author's style,...

Turn grammar practice into a game, a video game this is! Scholars show what they know about figurative language with a video game that takes them through a land filled with coins, magic, and animals. Concepts include similes,...

Bells, bells, bells abound in a worksheet designed for Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem "The Bells." Middle schoolers are asked to identify the various poetic devices Poe employs.

S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders is still relatable to teenagers today, even though it was written more than 50 years ago. Explore how the figurative language of the story works to establish characterization, and how foreshadowing lays...

Whether you are teaching a newspaper unit in language arts, covering the First Amendment and censorship in social studies, or focusing on writing ethics in journalism, a unit based on the foundations of journalism would be an excellent...

Language arts learners don't need a lecture about poetry; they listen to poetry every day on the radio! Apply skills from literary analysis to famous songs and beautiful lyrics with a lesson about literary devices. As...

The Georgia Department of Education provides practice for their Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in English/Language Arts with 30 multiple-choice questions.

Analyze the components of precise wording and vivid language in this language arts lesson plan. Middle school writers illustrate a passage from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and write a response to a Norman Rockwell print....

Whether you are viewing a landscape painting of a farm, examining a still-life portrait of a bowl of fruit, or reading a descriptive poem about cultivating food, you can't deny that agriculture plays a major role in visual and language...

Similes and metaphors make writing more beautiful and detailed, but can be a little harder to decipher during a first reading. Use a passage from The Man Who Loved Words to show young readers how to think through passages that...

Improve your pupils' language skills with these discussions and activities. There are four topics included here, and each is paired with discussion prompts (small group and whole class), student handouts, and teacher notes. After...

Give your resource class an overview of grammar. While these slides are not complicated, they are nonetheless geared toward middle and high-school learners, who understand some academic language. The presentation ends with a list of...

Eighth graders are introduced to performance art as a way to respond to important current-day issues in society. Pupils create their very own original art work using photography and poetry. These three lessons do a nice job of, not only...

Explore objective and subjective writing in this interdisciplinary lesson, which brings language arts and visual art together. Middle and high school learners examine the sculpture Head with Horns by Paul Gauguin. They then analyze the...

Show what you know. Learners demonstrate mastery of English grammar and usage by completing a pen-and-paper assessment of verbals and verb shifts. In addition, they begin composing a book review based on an independent reading book. The...

Looking for some quick grammar warm-ups? What about handy spelling crossword puzzles? Find everything you need with a resource that contains practice worksheets for parts of speech, parts of a sentence, common grammatical errors, tricky...

Reinforce understanding of five literary terms with a single-slide flow chart. Learners figure out if various words and phrases are examples of simile, metaphor, hyperbole, understatement, or personification.