Knock, knock, knock...Creep out your class with a critical thinking lesson focused on word relationships in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." They investigate  the relationship between word choice, mood, and interpretation of...

Designed to support a visit to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery exhibition “Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time,” which ran from June 18, 1999 through January 2, 2000, the approach detailed and the activities included in...

Casting, setting, context, frame, camera angle, lighting, soundtrack. Every choice a writer or director makes is conscious. Here's a worksheet that asks readers/viewers to examine these choices and consider how they are used to to...

Revisit the documentaries viewed in the previous lesson in this series in order to take a look at the persuasive techniques employed by the documentary creators. Small groups watch the films a second time, taking notes on two provided...

Kermit would really enjoy this prompt. Young writers select something green, describe it, identify where it is found and how it is used, and then illustrate their something.

Looking for a fresh approach to an end-of-unit project for The Odyssey? Check out a resource that has class members write their own hero's journey short story and then craft an illustration that depicts their tale. Apollonio di...

First graders practice visualization. In this reading and listening comprehension strategy visualization lesson, 1st graders close their eyes and listen to the teacher describe a familiar place, then draw what they visualized in their...

Students engage in a lesson that presents strategies to overcome the hurdles that discourage writers under pressure. They develop a paragraph of narrative text in response to a quote, motto or poem.

Support your writers! Clear procedures and appropriate support make this a superb resource for elementary writing instruction. Ready your class to compose original descriptive paragraphs inspired by the episode in Roald Dahl's James and...

Play a vocabulary game with words from an article about Savion Glover's contribution to the film "Happy Feet." Then, small groups of young scholars design and create original movie advertisements using vivid vocabulary to give Glover the...

To better understand the cultural achievements of the Harlem Renaissance and become familiar with its major figures, class members examine a painting by Aaron Douglas and a poem by Langston Hughes and compare how the artists develop...

Students examine the painting, The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan based on a poem by Lord Byron. They compare how Romantic artists and writers made choices about visual elements and language to depict their subjects.

Here are two great lessons that work together and are inspired by the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods. Young writers and actors will retell the story of "The Frog Prince" through games, improvisational script writing, and...

Take writing prompts to another level in this activity, which allows pupils to create scenes of dialogue based on the 1903 silent film, The Great Train Robbery. Useful for a language arts/history cross-curricular activity, the lesson...

Relate the structure of the essay to the structure of a building. The class compares an essay to a building, with the writer being the architect, the introduction being the foundation, and so on. They use the visual representation of a...

Write with the senses! Try using art to inspire writers to consider all of the senses. Here, the class is divided in half. Each group looks at one of two images, imagines the senses that would be engaged, and records answers to five...

Students examine American humor and character through analysis of works by Mark Twain. In this cross curricular lesson, students develop a definition of American humor and determine how and why some consider Twain the 'first truly...

Students analyze portraits of Ernest Hemingway to see how his private and public personalities are revealed through them. In this "Picturing Hemingway" lesson, students complete a variety of activities to investigate public and private...

Young scholars read a play and create their own play using Thornton Wilder's Our Townas a resource. In this play lesson, students analyze how theatrical elements contribute to a play's meanings and effects. Young scholars recognize...

Emerging writers identify allusion in poetry by listening to recorded poems, like Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town. They also discuss what makes writing satirical and how writers use allusions to make satirical points.  

Young writers create memory books. They think of important events in their lives from the past year. Then they draw pictures that depict these events, and dictate captions to an adult who writes them down in their books for them. These...

Applying photography basics they learn for this project, first graders take pictures of an adult at work focusing on the tools used, the work site, and job responsibilities. After making a career book that includes photos and...

By viewing the works of Robert Harris, high schoolers gain an understanding of what life was like back in the Victorian era of Canada's history. They also peruse many works of Victorian era writers in order to further their understanding...

Use a Courbet painting of a cave or tunnel opening to reinforce the importance of descriptive writing. Writers of all ages use sensory details to describe what the scene depicts as they pretend to be in the painting. Then they imagine...