Exposing learners to the power of words in poetry is a stimulating way to learn languages. Songs, haikus, rhyming words, and narrative works are all employed in a resource for teaching English as a Second Language.

Lines from Shakespeare and from hip-hop artists provide learners with an opportunity to examine the literary devices these artists use to express their ideas about love. Groups use the provided lines to craft found poems, and then the...

Encourage your pupils to think critically about media and the messages media portrays. Starting off with a quick-write about pop culture, this assignment launches into a hands-on, collaborative collage project. After creating collages,...

When is using someone else's copyrighted material appropriate? Learn about copyright and fair use with a lesson from PBS.org. Scholars read through a reference sheet about authors' rights and users' rights, and then create posters...

Good Night, Moon is a classic little ones absolutely love. It's a sweet book that can be used, as in this instructional activity, to start a conversation about the difference between night and day. After reading the story, the class...

Eliminate all doubt when it comes to sentence structure with nine thorough lesson plans. Whether you want your young writers to vary their sentence structure or shore up their knowledge of conjunctions and semicolons, these lessons are a...

Get to know your scholars with this in-depth survey that asks learners to rate, answer true or false, write short answers, and draw abstract visuals about their academic and personal preferences.

Prepare class members for formative assessments of student thinking in reading (FAST-R) with a resource that compares Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy" and Maya Angelou's "Caged Bird." Readers respond to 10 multiple choice questions and...

From the time of its publication, Uncle Tom's Cabin has been controversial. To better understand the debate, class members first examine a broadside decrying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and then two newspaper reviews of the...

How do pupils relate paired passages to each other? Here's a resource that helps! The lesson includes a short story and a poem as a set of paired reading passages, followed by some analysis questions. It also includes an essay template...

Engage little learners in this moderately developed three-lesson unit on the composer Camille Saint-Saens and his piece "The Carnival of Animals." Each lesson includes a listening, discussion, and an art project to engage your class in...

A short film about music is the inspiration for a well-sequenced lesson that includes discussion, group work, and writing. After the whole class converses about music, small groups write narratives about a still from the film. Pupils...

After reading Acts III and IV of Othello, give your class a fun, interactive, music-related activity. Begin by asking students about songs they have heard in movies or plays. Let them look up the lyrics online and ruminate about the...

Research, art history, and web page creation! Sounds too good to be true. With tons of links and resources, the lesson provides you with everything needed to engage the class in an amazing art and research activity. They create...

"The Hare and the Water," a Tanzanian folk tale, lends a global perspective to literary analysis. Learners spend the first two days reading and storyboarding. On day three, they examine folk tale elements (worksheet included), and design...

Newspapers aren't only for reading—they're for learning skills, too! A journalism unit provides three lessons each for primary, intermediate, and secondary grades. Lessons include objectives, materials, vocabulary, and procedure, and...

Did you know that honey bees dance to communicate information? Do you know why bees use hexagons to build their hives? The Honeybee Man, Brilliant Bees, and Show me the Honey provide background information on how honey bees communicate....

Students listen to a variety of poetry and music that depicts emotions or feelings. As a class, they brainstorm a list of words that they use to show their feelings. To end the lesson, they listen to one song individually and make their...

"Ode to la Tortilla" and "Ode to Joy"? Sure! Use Gary Soto's poem to introduce learners to the ode format. After examining the descriptive words Soto uses, class members study a poster of Ludwig van Beethoven, suggest words that describe...

Learners follow five steps to compose an alliteration poem. They choose one consonant and brainstorm as many nouns, verbs, and adjectives they can think of to create rhyming sentences that come together in a poetic fashion. 

Jazz and the City, Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement, Jazz and Gender, Jazz and Literature, Jazz and the Arts, Jazz and Film. Here's a packet of unit plans organized around themes that reflect American culture. Each unit examines how...

Tone is a tough topic to teach to teenagers. But never, fear, help is here in the form of a unit plan that takes advantage of their interest in music to set the stage for a series of activities that lead them to understand how setting,...

Show your school spirit! Class members use instruments or sing along and employ what they have learned in the two previous lessons to perform their school's songs.

Anita's iconic rooftop ode to American life in West Side Story is the focus of a lesson on immigration. As class members listen to "America," they follow along with printed lyrics, and discuss whether they agree with Anita's...