Celebrate and honor Native American culture with this set of graphic organizers that showcases literature like The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses and A Boy Called Slow as well as three other Native American literature books....

A six-week unit takes high schoolers through various works of African-American literature, including poems, plays, and short stories. The lesson plan format includes a week-by-week description of activities, goals, materials, and...

Study the transformation of American literature starting from Colonial times up until the present. Each of the nine periods (Romanticism, Realism, Postmodernism, etc.) is introduced and important literary agents from that period are...

Introduce your class to the writing of the indigenous Americans and, even more well known, their story telling. An engaging presentation describes what kinds of texts would be included in the oral stories performed and some common...

Here is a complex lesson plan that interweaves the history of the Jim Crow South and the Great Migration with the study of poetry, art, and blues music from the Harlem Renaissance. The plan helps young historians develop a deep...

Introduce your middle schoolers to the lives of past Native Americans. First, learners work together to put photographs in a sequence. Then, using their sequence, they create stories to share with the whole class. No matter how old your...

To better understand early American literature, which was usually written by Puritans coming to the new world, learners pretend they have just landed on Mars. They compose a letter home describing their experiences, the new landscape,...

What characterizes modern literature? The first few slides of this 31-slide PowerPoint discuss what sparked the change to Modernism and discuss some of the key figures of the time (like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud). The 20s and 30s are...

While reading Arthur Miller's The Crucible, start or end each day with a journal activity. The project includes a list of prompts for each act of the play. Pupils choose a prompt every time they write and connect their own experiences to...

How much do you know about Latin American music? A crossword puzzle challenges learners to answer 24 questions about the history, genres, performers, and instruments of Latin American music.

Have your 5th or 6th graders read Freak the Mighty? Check their reading comprehension with this online worksheet. They answer 15 different questions based on chapter 3: American Flyer.

Middle schoolers examine how American Indians are represented in today's society. They read stories, analyze maps, and complete a chart and create an illustration about a specific tribe.

Eleventh graders ponder about what it means to be an "American." They discuss the impact of an author's word choice and sentence structure on text. They identify some major themes and development of the Letters... Compose paragraphs and...

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is famous, in part, because it established a uniquely American form of humor. For this famous story, Mark Twain combines the tall-tale, the dialect story, and satire. Here is a resource...

A 154-page anthology explores the life, culture, and history of Native Americans. Eight lessons follow the routine of introducing the reading, conducting the reading, discussing it, doing word work, then taking part in an extension...

Examine the contributions of African-Americans in the worlds of art and literature. Over the course of a few days, young scholars will read and analyze a poem, a short story, and a piece of art. They complete a range of...

Identify text features, make inferences, and discover the cultural significance of Native American Poetry. Sixth graders read several Native American poems and use graphic organizers and literature response logs to record their feelings...

Young scholars examine the concept of historical perspective in writing. They read the diary of Sally Wister, a young Patriot from Philadelphia during the Revolutionary Era. Additionally, they must include different points of view in...

The attitudes of European settlers toward the American wilderness, as reflected in art and literature, is the focus of this resource packet designed for teachers. Included in the unit overview you will find lists or paintings and...

Carl Sandburg composed poetry that conveyed a time and place in American Literature and history. Learners identify the literary techniques he uses to describe the historical and cultural context of living in Chicago. They define the...

America was founded by dreamers, and the American dream still resonates in our country today. Track the American dream from its Puritan beginnings to its optimistic descendants with a instructional activity that focuses on speeches...

Students examine primary documents regarding Paul Revere's ride and its role in the Revolutionary War. They consider how Revere's role has been written about by Longfellow and others and discuss the discrepancies between accounts.

Entitled American Studies, this small unit covers various topics related to the study of the United States. Learners warm up by creating a dictionary of democracy, then dive into three different lessons focused on government, famous...

Bring multi-cultural experiences and literature into your language arts class with this instructional activity. Here, young readers explore the points of view of first and second-generation Asian immigrants with a list of various fiction...