While music lyrics are often used to teach literary elements, the richness of this resource comes from the wealth of exercises, activities, and support materials provided in the packet.  Although designed for gifted learners, the...

Introduce your freshmen to reading comprehension strategies and key literary elements with a year's worth of lessons and exercises. Each lesson focuses on a specific literary device and includes a definition of the term, a passage that...

Make learning the definitions of literary terms memorable with a fun and engaging activity. Teams of scholars are given several terms and create an acrostic poem with simplified definitions and examples.

The author study gets an update in a research project designed for high schoolers. Scholars search for information about literary figures that connects them to their times, their works, their themes, and other writers. Researchers also...

Mermaids will sing to your class members as they engage in an activity related to T.S. Eliot's famous dramatic interior monologue. After engaging in a socratic seminar about literary devices in the poem, individuals choose one...

Assess your new learners' writing abilities and knowledge of literary terms with these diagnostic activities. Part of a back-to-school unit, this is meant to provide the teacher with information about the ability levels of their class....

Explore point of view and more with a Common Core-designed instructional activity. Learners experience different points of view by representing one of two characters from Esperanza Rising during a partner discussion. They must use...

Do you know the setting of The Count of Monte Cristo? What about the main characters? Explore the elements of Alexandre Dumas' novel with a reading comprehension activity. Kids toss boxes with literary elements written on each side,...

Clement Moore's "Twas the Night Before Christmas" models the power of descriptive language for middle schoolers. They identify the similes and metaphors in the tale and consider what these descriptions add to the story's emotional...

Now that your class has read all of Esperanza Rising, take the time to tackle big metaphors and themes. Pupils will participate in an activity called Chalk Talk, in which they circulate around the room in small groups and add...

"What is the theme of this story?" Now there's a question that can strike fear in the hearts of learners. Here's a lesson that uses photographs to introduce the concept of theme. Scholars examine six photographs and then attach a theme...

"Is that your final answer?" Challenge and thrill your class with this language arts game, which is based on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." The game covers literary terms such as point of view, alliteration, and protagonist, and is...

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...

Combine the study of poetry and non-fiction texts with this complete and ready-to-use six-week unit. After reading numerous poems from local writers and compiling a personal anthology, high schoolers find and read a memoir or biography...

"Eneke the bird says since men have learnt to shoot without missing, he has learnt to fly without perching." As part of their study of Things Fall Apart, class members read Paul Hernadi and Francis Steen's essay, "The Tropical Landscapes...

Robert Hayden's poem "Those Winter Sundays" serves as the anchor text in a five-part lesson plan that takes the mystery out of poetry analysis by modeling explicit strategies for pupils to employ to conduct a close reading of a poem....

Over the course of a 12-lesson language arts unit, young scholars analyze a variety of poems taking a close look at figurative language and tone. They learn to compare and contrast, improve comprehension, and identify settings. To...

Through the journey of four stories of immigration, scholars complete graphic organizers and apply knowledge to create a visual representation of their findings on a large poster. Third and fourth readers write a letter to their...

Engage further in Esperanza Rising with a focus on close reading and metaphor. Class members zero in on the tenth chapter, examining characters and big ideas. Pupils discuss the text in small groups and as a whole class, and...

A speaker, a message, an audience. After analyzing these elements in Queen Elizabeth's speech to the troops at Tilbury, groups analyze how other speakers use an awareness of events, and their audience to craft their arguments....

After a review of poetic terms, groups are given an object and they create a poem using a simile, a metaphor, internal rhyme, end rhyme, alliteration, and personification. Groups then exchange objects and repeat the process. Consider...

After finishing The Catcher in the Rye, review new vocabulary with an individualized bingo game. Class members develop a list of new vocabulary drawn from the novel or literary devices studied during the unit. Individuals then place...

“Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.” Mary Alice, the fifteen-year-old narrator of A Year Down Yonder, is forced to leave Chicago and spend a year with her Grandma Dowdel in a small rural...