Scholars analyze fiction and nonfiction text and fill in a worksheet detailing the text's title, genre, and reason for its classification.

Building on the previous activity in this series of lesson seeds, this plan focuses on the use of dialect in Theodore Taylor's novel, The Cay. Class members examine specific lines of text, use their reading journals to respond to the...

Scary stuff! Whether approached as the first horror story or a "serious imaginative exploration of the human condition," Frankenstein continues to engage readers. Here's a packet of activities that uses Mary Shelley's gothic...

Cross-comparison, the technique of focusing on two different texts with the same themes, motifs, events, etc., is employed in an exercise that asks groups to examine two different translations of “The Ruin,” a poem, written in Old...

If you're looking to set your class up for writing effective arguments, try out this idea. While originally created with freedom as a guiding idea, the activity could easily be adapted for other themes. As a class, create a chart of...

Finding good primary source materials to support any study of history can be a challenge and time-consuming. A set of 11 primary source letters, images, and text excerpts provide young historians with an opportunity to sharpen their...

Visit the Magic Treehouse and take your class on a trip through time with a reading of the children's book Mummies in the Morning. Using the story to spark an investigation into Egyptian culture, this literature unit engages...

Explore the works of Dr. Seuss, such as Horton Hears a Who, Horton Hatches and Egg, The Sneetches and Other Stories, The Lorax, The Butter Battle Book, and Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. Each story lesson includes reading...

Imagine a list that includes Alan Abelson of Baron's, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, and Mother Jones. High schoolers select a national columnist, read and annotate five columns by this author, noting the rhetorical...

Address the literary elements in a piece of writing using these materials. The packet includes plenty of resources, and focuses mainly on theme, character, and point of view, with some materials for setting, symbolism, and author's...

It is no easy feat to wade through legal and political documents. And incorporating this type of informational text into a literature class can also be a challenge. Here’s a resource that includes suggestions for how to address this...

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" serves as an exemplar for a mini-activity on semicolons. Working alone or in small groups, class members first circle all the semicolons in the letter, and then consider how...

Scholars learn about the Hero's Journey as they read Ray Bradbury's "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh." They analyze the story's structure and narrative techniques. Finally, they write summaries of the text's central idea and use their...

For as small as they are, plankton sure play an enormous role in maintaining marine ecosystems. Dive into an investigation of these tiny organisms with a hands-on life science activity in which children cut out pictures of sea...

As the saying goes: there are no new stories. Standard 9 for reading literature in the Common Core addresses this fact and requires that students be able to analyze how authors use the themes, stories, and characters of earlier works....

Take your classes back in time. Learners read real historical texts from both Darwin and Wallace as well as an announcement of their findings. Using guiding questions, they make inferences and draw conclusions from the information in the...

During a three-part lesson, learners make a cabbage juice pH indicator and use it to analyze the waste products of yeast after feeding them with sugar. The intent is to demonstrate how living organisms produce carbon dioxide, which is...

Make analyzing the sequence of events in an informational text easy. Ask readers to craft a one-sentence summary of each paragraph in a document and create a text map. To demonstrate their understanding of the process, participants read...

Draw back the curtain, add a spot of joy to your class, and let learners be lessoned by a close reading exercise that models how to develop an interpretation based on evidence drawn from a text. Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My...

What a great idea for celebrating Women's History Month and discovering the amazing efforts that individuals have put forth on behalf of women's rights! Learners take a closer look at the speeches and other primary source documents of...

Inflate this unit on the science of air with these math skills practice and word problems. Accompanying the children's story Mr. Slaptail's Secret, this resource covers a wide range of math topics including the four basic...

Make a splash with a math skills resource! Starring characters from the children's story Mystery of the Muddled Marsh, several worksheets create interdisciplinary connections between science, language arts, and math. They...

Choosing a poet or a theme, eighth graders conduct research in the world of poetry. They conduct Internet research and select five poems that fit their poet or theme, and create a seven slide PowerPoint presentation on their selected...

Identifying an author’s choice, especially choices that concern craft and literary devices, is a difficult skill to teach. Here's an activity that will make your job easier. The resource breaks down how to teach the skill to novice,...