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...

How close are your eighth graders to mastering the ELA Common Core standards? Keep an eye on progress with these charts, which include every eighth grade identifier and full standard text. As you move through the year and teach,...

Help your seventh graders relate the ELA Common Core standards to their own learning with these "I Can" statement posters. Each standard has been translated into a statement that pupils can understand and placed on its own page for...

Pass the tea! Using the resource, scholars participate in a Tea Party protocol to analyze text and images about inventions that helped meet societal demands. After sharing their observations with each other, they discuss visual elements...

Are your classes weary of dreary worksheets? Are the learners nearly napping? Thrill them, fill them with delight with an interactive worksheet that asks them to identify the figurative language Edgar Allen Poe uses to add horror and...

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...

Track your class's progress on all of the ELA Common Core standards with these handy charts. Along the left side, each seventh grade identifier is listed along with the full text of the standard. As you teach, reteach, assess,...

To conclude a study of A Raisin in the Sun and to prepare for a visit to the Lewis Museum, class members analyze Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem." Learners then draw connections to characters in the play and to their own experiences...

Eighth graders identify figurative language and poetry in this literary analysis lesson. Using Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll and a YouTube video for "The Walrus and the Carpenter," young readers complete a literary device...

Helpful for an American literature or history unit, this instructional activity prompts middle schoolers to examine slavery in the United States. They read slave narratives that were part of the Federal Writers' Project and then conduct...

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...

Look back at the third chapter of The Cay with your class. Pupils will conduct a close reading, taking a second look at a chunk of text and responding to a series of text-dependent questions. Wrap up with an analytical writing prompt...

Use Langston Hughes's poem, "Words Like Freedom," to explore the concepts of freedom and liberty. Learners read the poem, determine the theme, and use the provided graphic organizer to examine the connotative and denotative meanings of...

What does it mean to read expressively? Beginning readers hear examples of expressive reading and partner up to practice. One partner reads The Littlest Pumpkin and the other partner reads Franklin and his Friend. While...

Challenge your class with this comprehensive list of literary vocabulary words. Learners take a pre-test, look up definitions, come up with an example, and then take a post-test. You might use this prior to a unit about poetic devices in...

Eighth graders read act 1 scenes 1 & 2 of the play Diary of Anne Frank. In this Diary of Anne Frank lesson plan, 8th graders discuss how the setting of the play affects the mood of the story and answer short answer questions.

Students write a poetic analysis on a poem by Carl Sandburg. They take their previous knowledge of poetic devices and apply them to a piece of writing that displays their knowledge on a specific poem. They explain what they know about a...

Students put themselves in the shoes of American Civil War soldiers. In this Civil War lesson, students examine letters from the time period written by soldiers, edit the letters for grammatical errors, and then present the letters to...

Eighth graders study and analyze the elements of color by creating an personalized color wheel. Emphasis is placed on constructive criticism of student work by others for assessment. Students create short poems for their color wheel...

Students read slave narratives and retell the stories to the class, identifying sensory details. In this slavery lesson, students discuss the importance of sensory details, then read the slave narratives looking for specific examples. ...

Students discuss how oral interpretation varies with prose and poetry. They select a piece of prose or poetry to present to the class, and then assess each other on the organization and delivery of their speech as well as on their...

High schoolers investigate the quality of writing while focusing on the use of sensory words to convey meaning and ideas. The power of similes and metaphors is emphasized while they create and edit works of writing. The skill of...

High schoolers explore early attempts at written language. In this early civilizations lesson, students investigate first attempts at written communication. Among the civilizations covered are Mayan, Greek, and Egyptian.

Twelfth graders use an Internet scavenger hunt, vocabulary, sample essay questions, and short answer questions suitable for study and review of the play, The Crucible.