Immerse your class in a good story with an extensive resource featuring reader's theater techniques. The worksheets are designed for both teacher and student, and carefully explain how to organize, write, and perform stories in a...

Introduce your classes to the Art of Rhetoric with a lesson that focuses on Aristotle's persuasive appeals and how they have been used, both ethically and unethically, to influence opinion.

Prepare your classes for the impending state testing! Give each student the reading passage and questions, and then set the timer. Encourage them to use specific reading strategies to improve comprehension. They could start by reading...

The cat might have got your tongue, but you can’t avoid the elephant in the room while you wait for the other shoe to drop. After all, the early bird gets the worm and the chickens are circling. After researching Poet Laureate Kay Ryan...

Explore a variety of fables to learn life's lessons through engaging stories. Add rigor to the learning process with activities that include matching a a fable to the story's moral, short answer exit slips, and a three-column graphic...

The depth of Nineteen Eighty Four is in the details. Encourage a close reading of Orwell's dystopian classic with resource sheets that focus attention on the author's stylistic choices that lead to the betrayals that make Big Brother's...

Considering a research paper for freshman and sophomores? Here's a template designed to meet the W.9-10.7 and 8 Common Core writing standards. Writers outline their research question, claims, counterarguments, support, commentary, and...

Here is an interesting punctuation activity! Your young learners cut out five periods and five question marks. Then, they paste them onto 10 sentences that need end punctuation marks. A good, hands-on lesson for young readers!

“When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?” Why (s)he collects evidence and writes an essay! Prepare your readers for a compare/contrast or reflective essay on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by giving them...

What is a possessive? Review the information at the top of the page before asking your class to work on this independently. For the first eight questions, your learners add the necessary s's and apostrophes when appropriate. For the...

Translate the first speaking and listening standard for yourself and your ninth and tenth graders! Learners can focus on communicating in small groups with the two activities presented here. Both activities center around group creation...

Get your learners going with frames and starters designed for responding to a text. The starters come in speech bubbles, arrows, and other fun shapes that you can cut out and use in a variety of different ways. Also included are pages...

Good discussion questions are hard to find and even harder to craft. If you're looking for questions that will stimulate in-depth discussions for all four books in of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, check out this resource.

Does your ELA class need some practice with the specific skills outlined in the Common Core standards? Then this is the perfect resource for you! One in a series of connected lessons that cover the standards for reading literature,...

This cross-curricular reading comprehension worksheet asks kids to read a short passage about gravity and then to answer questions about the article.

You want your class to meet all of the Common Core standards, and here is one way to tackle the first speaking and listening standard. Given a theme to focus on from "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" by Leo Tolstoy, small groups come up...

Could you go without your cell phone for 48 hours? Pose this question to your class and then read the article provided here. Pupils mark the text and and complete a graphic organizer that requires the use of textual evidence.

Encourage scholars to share their love of reading with informative and engaging book reviews. Here, you'll find a series of guides that walk learners through the review writing process. Included in the collection is information about...

An effective lesson plan truly can make all the difference. Seventh graders read, analyze, and annotate Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" before writing an essay about what they believe to be the theme of the iconic poem.

Living in someone's shadow would be difficult for anyone, including one of the most talented artists of the modern age. Middle schoolers read an excerpt from Vincent Van Gogh: Portrait of an Artist by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan...

Conduct a lesson that leads into a writing assessment. After reading an excerpt from From Seed to Pumpkin, first graders demonstrate their interpretation of sections of the passage by sketching the details from each part.

A three-day assessment challenges scholars to read a passage from an informational text then complete two activities that lead to a writing assignment. Day one and two begin as readers independently read a passage and tag the most...

A performance task challenges scholars to read an informational text then respond with an explanatory essay. The exam begins with an independent reading of Seeing Eye to Eye by Leslie Hall. A second reading follows with the...

An assessment challenges scholars to read an informative text then respond with an explanatory essay. The exam begins as participants read a text passage twice then take notes, making sure to jot down key details. Following the...