Big news isn't necessarily newsworthy everywhere! How do journalists decide what to cover with so much happening around them? A instructional activity on media literacy examines the factors that affect the media's choice of stories to...

Poetry is everywhere you look! Create found poems using headlines from newspapers and magazines. Young poetry focus on creating alliterative phrases with words they find in headlines, tying their poems to a central theme.

Young historians discover the experiences of runaway slaves after reading the brief biography and narrative excerpt of Henry "Box" Brown, who escaped slavery by having himself shipped away in a crate and popularized his...

Join the newspaper business with a series of lessons and exercises focused on elements of journalism. The packet focuses on distinguishing fact from opinion, writing effective headlines, sequencing events, and editing and...

Take a close look at a number of newspapers with collection of lessons and activities. Using a poster (which can be found under the materials tab), learners examine the hard copy of a local newspaper. This leads into an exploration of...

A lesson challenges scholars to analyze editorial cartoons created by Fred Seibel, illustrator for the Times-Dispatch, during the Massive Resistance. A class discussion looking at today's editorial pages and Jim Crow Laws leads the...

Once the class learns about the hero's journey, they'll find it in every story and movie they see! Take characters from their humble beginnings to their atonement and apotheosis with a set of lessons about the hero's journey...

This is a fantastic resource designed for learners to envision what it was like for the three million African-Americans who migrated to urban industrial centers of the northern United States between 1910 and 1940. After reading a...

After analyzing newspaper articles portraying different perspectives of the explosion of the Battleship USS Maine, your young historians will take a stand on which position is the most believable in both discussion and writing.

The ultimate legacy of Emmett Till's violent death is its role in the non-violent roots of the Civil Rights Movement. A lesson compares contemporaneous articles with the lyrics of Bob Dylan's "The Death of Emmett Till" and prompts...

All sources are pretty much the same, right? If this is how your class views the sources they use for writing or research projects, present them with a media literacy lesson on smart source evaluation. Groups examine several articles,...

This comprehensive resource looks at the discovery of gold through the use of nonconventional means. Students read diaries, newspapers, maps, photographs, and government documents and view things people used in their everyday lives.