Teach with Movies
Teaching Students to Write a Narrative
Encourage narrative writing with a clever exercise. Class members watch episodes from movies and describe what happened to a character, including details about the setting, plot, and characters. Writers then craft a narrative about a...
Channel Islands Film
Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island: Lesson Plan 2
After watching West of the West's documentary The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, class members imagine how Juana Maria/Karana may have felt about living alone on the island for 18 years and craft a blackout poem or a narrative in her...
Star Wars in the Classroom
"Shakespeare and Star Wars": Lesson Plan Day 6
How can a screenplay create meaning and drama in ways that other forms of writing cannot? That is the question class members must answer as they compare the cantina scene of the screenplay for George Lucas's Star Wars: A New Hope with...
Curated OER
Satire and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Does Mark Twain’s satire become sarcasm and does he cross the line of propriety in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? As an introduction of satire, class members view an excerpt from The Daily Show and discuss Stewart's use of this...
Academy of American Poets
On "El Florida Room" by Richard Blanco
Scholars of all ages examine Richard Blanco's poem, "El Florida Room." Looking closely at pictures, pupils look for details that stand out to them, then read the poem. A whole-class discussion allows learners to reflect on what they...
Scholastic
Reading Characters
Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass provides the text for a study of how writers bring characters to life. Using the provided character mapping worksheets, readers respond to questions and then write a short character sketch.
Pulitzer Center
Peacebuilding: Taking Home Lessons Learned in Africa
Learners take a closer look at one journalist's work on UN Peacebuilding efforts in four African nations: Sierra Leone, Burundi, Central African Republic, and Guinea Bissau. They collaborate to define peacebuilding and discuss the...
Curated OER
5 Broken Cameras: How Storytellers Shape the Story
5 Broken Cameras, the award-winning documentary nominated for a 2013 Academy Award and winner of the Sundance 2012 Directors Award is the focus of a resource packet that includes a lesson plan, discussion guide, reading lists, background...
Safe Drinking Water Foundation
To Filter or Not to Filter
Drinking clean water can be taken for granted. Explore the process and high cost of filtering water with a water pollution and filtration activity. Young scientist build a filtration system to filter polluted water, examine the economics...
Curated OER
Constructing Narrative from the Migrant Experience in Literature
Excerpts from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and from John Fante's Ask the Dust, as well as a variety of primary source documents provide the background for an examination of the migrant experience from 1920-1945.
Florida Alliance for Arts Education
Theatre Arts
What skills do storytellers employ to bring to life the characters and events in their tales? After listening to a recording of a Haitian folk tale, class members consider how tone of voice, pace, and gestures can be used to enliven a...
National Endowment for the Humanities
“House by the Railroad”: A Painting and a Poem for the Common Core
Introduce your class to ekphrastic poetry with an exercise that asks them to examine Edward Hooper's painting House by the Railroad and Edward Hirsch's poem "Edward Hopper and the House By the Railroad." After a close reading of the two...
Curated OER
The Use of Language in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"
Readers of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are asked to craft an essay in which they compare how Maya Angelou uses figurative language to depict herself and Mrs. Flowers.