The motto for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry warns that one should never tickle a sleeping dragon, but learners will definitely be tickled by the activities in a packet of materials designed to accompany a reading of the...

Wouldn't it be great to live an a community without pain, without danger? Such a society is the goal of the community in The Giver. Using Lois Lowry's dystopian novel as the core text, class members read primary source materials...

"It's alive!" Or is it? Scholars tackle the question of what it means to be human in a lesson that asks them to research the Turning Test and other devices that attempt to prove whether AI devices can pass as humans. After participants...

A read-aloud anthology explores the ancient greek civilization. Over four weeks, second graders explore Mount Olympus, Sparta, Athens, the olympic games, philosophers, and Alexander the Great. Scholars listen to and discuss a reading,...

Upper elementary schoolers investigate philanthropy and selflessness by reading a children's book. In this ethics lesson, they read The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, and research Mahatma Gandhi's troublesome, yet inspiring, life....

Introduce young philosophers to the wisdom of China's most famous thinkers with a short bio. The reading comprehension passage includes an answer key.

Who is J.D. Salinger? Give your class some information on the famous recluse before reading his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye. His life and works are detailed, and there are even a few slides dedicated to controversies and criticism...

No matter how your day is going, it probably hasn't started out as badly as Gregor Samsa's day. Explore the essentially—and definitively—Kafkaesque story of a man-turned-vermin with a short and straightforward crossword puzzle on...

The danger of mob mentality is on display in The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Get your class thinking with some challenging quickwrite questions, then assign characters from the play to be read aloud altogether. Links to worksheets...

Shocking! After viewing a short clip from the 1931 movie, Frankenstein and reviewing electricity references in Mary Shelley's novel, class members examine Luigi Galvani's and Alessandro Volta's observations on electricity and muscle...

The emotional and spiritual oppression of slavery in the African-American experience is the focus of this activity. Middle schoolers analyze various texts by Frederick Douglass and Maya Angelou related to freedom and...

Take classes on an in-depth tour of the Declaration of Independence. An informative resource effectively scaffolds learning by providing warm-up and wrap-up activities. It also includes a variety of handouts for individuals to complete,...

In this Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone instructional activity, students draw characters from the book, write descriptions about the character, and then exchange another students description and draw the character they...

Building upon prior lessons in the series, this reading and writing exercise requires pupils to look back at their own writing, track character development in the novel The Cay, and analyze how Phillip has changed. The reading focus is...

Responding to a question on the Machiavellian principle of a ruler's need for power and ruthlessness, young historians are given writing tips and a framework for constructing a well-developed essay in 25 minutes. The given structure of...

In this online interactive reading comprehension learning exercise, students respond to 15 multiple choice questions based on The Worldly Philosophers. Students may submit their answers to be scored.

CliffsNotes provides a list of study questions to help your high schoolers grapple with The Worldly Philosophers. Some of them are simple and straight forward, while others offer an opportunity to dig in deeper! Consider printing this...

A 20-page curriculum guide for Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince includes five lessons and related worksheets. For background, class members research and create travel brochures for Florence, Italy, in 1500. Next, they analyze...

The second lesson in a series of fourteen, this plan takes the short story basics a step further. Learners complete a quiz about the story from the previous day, discuss the text, learn about Anton Chekhov, and work in groups to begin...

Candace Fleming's award winning Ben Franklin's Almanac is the anchor text for a classroom guide that provides teachers with a cache of pre, during, and post-reading activities.

"How come there's no ending?" After a close reading of Frank R. Stockton's tale "The Lady, or the Tiger?" in which scholars examine each of the main characters' conflicts and motivations, writers craft their own ending using textual...

Teach young scholars how to determine the theme of a story, an insight the author wants to share with readers, with a instructional activity that uses Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace" as an anchor text. Learners examine the internal...

After reading Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," class members compare the characteristics of Ichabod Crane and Brom Van Brunt. Next, they read an article about ghosts that supposedly haunt the campus of Oklahoma...

Just what did Ben Franklin read? By juxtaposing Ben Franklin’s reading material as a young man with an analysis of his developed ideas, learners gain the opportunity to see how the influences of his youthful reading played out. Roman,...