Introduce your class to the characters from My Antonia by Willa Cather in a unique way. Given a hypothetical situation about an atomic bomb shelter and a list of character descriptions, pupils must decide which characters get to...

Walk your pupils through the beginning of My Antonia by Willa Cather with a read-aloud-style activity. The goal is to make predictions and back them up with textual evidence.

As an introduction to Sharon Creexh's Walk Two Moons, a volunteer dons a pair of boots and walks about the classroom.Observers then ponder the axiom, Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his...

The attached resource is no lie! The K-W-H-L activity, which is fourth in a series of seven, serves as a pre- and post-assessment. First, pupils brainstorm what they know about a specific topic, then they list what they want to know, how...

Chapter II of John Milton's Paradise Lost provides the text for a series of comprehension questions crafted using Bloom's Taxonomy.

How did the Civil Rights Movement affect young people in the United States? Scholars read Christopher Paul Curtis' novel, The Watsons go to Birmingham - 1963. Next, they write compare and contrast essays showing how the main...

How authors bring characters to life and make them believable is the focus of a lesson on characterization. Readers closely examine passages from To Kill a Mockingbird and Dreamland Burning, noting details that reveal the character's...

Preparation is the key to success! Using the guiding resource, scholars plan their end-of-unit analytical essays' introductory and concluding paragraphs based on their reading of Inside Out & Back Again. To prepare, they complete a...

Have you ever heard someone say the movie is not like the book? Scholars complete a mid-unit assessment to compare scenes from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird to the movie version. The assessment contains short answers, multiple choice,...

Check out the view! Scholars complete a graphic organizer to analyze how Laurence Yep develops a character's point of view in Dragonwings. Additionally, pupils re-read parts of the novel and annotate the text on sticky notes, looking for...

Get to the point ... the point of view, that is! Pupils analyze Laurence Yep's Dragonwings for tone, figurative language, and point of view by completing graphic organizers. Scholars also read an excerpt from the novel and record...

Perspective is everything. Using a graphic organizer, pupils determine Laurence Yep's perspective of the police in his novel Dragonwings. Additionally, scholars complete anchor charts to identify connotative language in the text.

Seventh graders need to be able to distinguish between major and minor characters and need to have read the novel Bearstone and be familiar with the sequence of events as well as the qualities displayed by each character over the course...

Students view a PowerPoint presentation in order to show the five jobs involved in a literature circle. The literature circle is to be used in the class for the reading of novels. A graphic organizer is also used to increase comprehension.

Fifth graders reflect upon different concepts of Language Arts while reading literature. In the novel Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, the characters discover a spring of eternal youth. After reading the first several chapters of...

Young readers select a book from a provided list to use as the basis for an intensive class study of Holocaust novels. After completing their novels, groups create a multimedia presentation highlighting the elements of literature...

Have you always wanted to try Literature Circles in your ELD class, but couldn't find a good way to start? This lesson plan is made for you, your middle-school readers and ideally, your SMARTboard (though the lesson plan could function...

Even though this lesson is just a basic way to review verb usage, it takes a novel approach. First, pupils identify verbs that they use too often in their writing, and then they create a Wordle. Wordle is a website that provides graphic...

Seventh graders examine the internal and external conflicts that Jonas faces in "The Giver" in an essay. Students use SMART Board and Inspiration to organize their ideas graphically before combining them into their paper.

“What is the role or function of controversial art? And, should children, our children, be required—forced—to study certain works they may find painful or humiliating or offensive?” Robert Zalisk’s question, found in his article, “Uproar...

Here is a lesson designed for middle schoolers which helps them recognize stereotypes one way or another against a particular group of people. They also determine what may have motivated the author to use a stereotype in the first place....

Close up your study of Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science with a letter-writing assignment. Pupils prepare by journaling and sharing with a partner. They then compose letters that focus on a big idea from the...

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis is one of the most prominent and influential books to come out of the existential movement. Host a group discussion in which learners list different characteristics of existent art, group...

How well do your pupils know My Antonia by Willa Cather? Take some time to create questions about the text. After examining a teacher model, individuals write questions that match each level of Bloom's Taxonomy and draft answers to these...