Do not let Julius Caesar be Greek to your pupils. Rather, make the play a dish fit for hungry minds. Encourage your class members to lend their ears to a series of rich discussion questions so that they can become masters of the play, as...

Bring the world of video messaging into your classroom with this creative communication application. Offering the ability to create animations with customized characters, backgrounds, and recorded messages, this resource is guaranteed to...

Readers analyze an excerpt from Kate DiCamillo's novel Because of Winn-Dixie. They read silently, and then hear it read aloud. Definitions for underlined vocabulary words are in the margin, and other potentially difficult words...

Readers' theater is a fun way to get kids reading with expression and improve their fluency! There is a full script here for The Three Bears with five characters to assign.

Students explore scenes from Katherine Paterson's book, Bridge to Terabithia. In this visualization lesson, students listen to the story read aloud. The students then choose words and phrases that paint a picture in their heads. Students...

The biopoem is a great way for instructors to get to know class members, classmates to get to know each other, and readers to flesh out their understanding of a character. Why not create a biopoem for a character from Oedipus the...

After completing Chapter 5 of Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, readers make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections to Victor Martinez's novel by crafting journal entries addressing comments and questions to characters in...

"What is George upset about? Check all that apply." Here's a learning exercise that asks readers to delve more deeply into character attitudes and motivations. In addition, Part II asks individuals to record passages from that text that...

Bully, bullied, or bystander? Paul Langan's The Bully is the anchor text in a unit that examines bullying and violence. After a close reading of the text, readers imagine themselves as the characters and consider how they would react in...

Turning 11 comes with a range of emotions. Explore those emotions by reading the short story "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros. Readers analyze the main character's reactions to the events of her day. Then, they write an essay describing what...

Rita Williams-Garcia's One Crazy Summer describes three girls who go looking for their mother who ran out on them. Scholars complete a novel study guide with vocabulary exercises, character descriptions, and comprehension poems.

You can often track a character's development based on others' reactions to their words or actions. Using Karen Russell's "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," ninth graders work in a jigsaw activity to analyze how Mirabella's...

Does identity come from within, or do external forces shape it? Explore the complex identity concept with a two-unit module for 12th-grade language arts. The first unit uses A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams and "A Daily Joy...

Use a character or person's motivation as the basis for a prediction of that character or person's next action. Pupils select an individual from their reading, copy a quote, write down an inference about that character's motives, and...

Here's a lesson plan you can really build on! Middle schoolers describe the occupants of an imaginary house during a character-building lesson plan. They create a cast of characters who share living space and provide details about their...

After listening to a story about Martin Luther King Jr., first graders answer questions about the text. They discuss the importance of the illustrations, identify the beginning, middle, and end of the story, and complete a writing...

Read this twist on Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Dusty Locks and the Three Bears by Susan Lowell. Kindergartners listen, predict, and discuss the story. They then participate in a dramatization of the story and draw a picture...

If you are beginning Laurence Yep's Dragonwings, this will provide activities for the first five chapters. The objectives include making connections to oneself and the world, organizing information and events, vocabulary acquisition,...

Students closely read " To Build a Fire," to explore the use of narrative point of view and debate the distinction between knowledge and instinct. The elements of literary naturalism and how they relate to Jack London's work is examined...

It's amazing the complex figures that can be made using only a few simple shapes. Following a class reading of the children's book Grandfather Tang's Story by Ann Tompert, young mathematicians use sets of tangrams to create models...

Everyone loves a great riddle, right? Everyone except for the characters in Shakespeare's Pericles, who will be killed unless they answer the king's riddle correctly. With the study guide, scholars use words coined by Shakespeare to play...

A writer has the responsibility to defend the less fortunate members of society. At least that was the view of Victor Hugo, author of Les Miserables. The novel is the subject of a study guide from Orlando Shakespeare Theater....

Things sure change in year's time. Suds, from Fourth Grade Rats, went from a third grade angel to a fourth grade rat! Although he is not necessarily happy with his new self, he worries he will lose his popularity. Learners complete...