What motivated Europeans to explore the New World, and what effects did their exploration have on Native American populations? The second installment of a 16-part American Passages series prompts pupils to watch a video and read several...

Elementary writers practice writing descriptive paragraphs by adding adjectives and sensory words to their writing. They use a picture of a monster for their descriptive paragraph. This 12-page lesson should increase your charges...

What were the virtues and values that helped form America? Pupils watch and discuss a video, read biographies of early Americans, chart the differences between early American religious movements, write journals and letters, draw, and...

A thorough lesson plan takes your first grade class through Jane Yolen's beautiful Owl Moon. It crafts the unit with clear objectives, high-level guiding questions, cloze activities and sentence frames, and extension...

Learners explore choreographic narrative. In this choreography lesson, students explore the elements of Appalachian Spring as they develop a series of written responses to assignments that challenge them to investigate the structure of...

Students examine the men and women who were a part of the Harlem Renaissance. Individually, they recreate their favorite pieces of art from the time period and create their own original works after reading poem from the movement. In...

Poetry and art analysis go hand-in-hand. In groups, youngsters analyze a landscape painting, making careful observations. They use details found in the painting to inspire an original poem. The poem must include at least three objects...

Dim the lights, take a deep breath, and press play to explore the emotions and memories that music elicits. Class members begin using relaxation techniques designed to create a positive listening experience. As music plays, learners...

The Humane Society provides a lesson in which class members explore the issue of tethering dogs. Through the resources used -- a comic, a poem, and narrative and expository writings -- class members realize that messages can be conveyed...

High schoolers find a group of words from an unlikely source and turn them into a poem. They discuss the central image in two well-known poems by Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson. They write their own short poem expressing one...

Learners cut out nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs from newspapers and create poems using words they have found.

Students are introduced to the elements of African-American poetry. As a class, they are read different types of poems to discover there are different styles of poems and practice rhyming words. They share information on their family...

Third graders gain an appreciation for writing, analyzing, reading and listening to poetry, viewing poems as a motivation for studying Japanese culture and tradition. They study and create their own haiku and tanka poems with illustrations.

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...

Explore legends and storytelling with your learners. After listening to some legends, pupils work collaboratively and then individually to come up with original legends about animals.

The released 2003 AP® exam asks scholars to read and respond to two poems about the love god Eros. They also analyze the characterization and narrative in The Other Paris. A final essay question requires pupils to choose a novel or play...

What do you imagine when you think of the sea? Put on some ocean sounds, close your eyes, and listen to a guided meditation based on the imagery from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. After class members listen to...

Class members will be as confident as prize-winning thoroughbreds after completing a worksheet on figurative language. Young writers jot down metaphors and similes for three categories: they way they look, they way...

Delve into Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis before opening the book with a lesson on literary themes. High schoolers engage in a word association activity before reading a list of statements based on the book's...

"How does our environment shape our identity?" After researching biographical information about John Knowles and considering how these experiences are reflected in A Separate Peace, class members consider the strengths and weaknesses of...

Dead trees provide nutrients for the soil, food for animals, protection and a home for organisms, a seed-bed for new trees, and a place for nitrogen-fixing bacteria to live. In the activity, pupils collect decaying logs, expose them to a...

Students build three-dimensional rough draft for a story by creating objects, people, places, animals, etc., with clay, and write story in a journal, poem, or other written form.

Students write diamonte poems that correspond to the double-exposed photograph they created.  In this poetry and multimedia artwork lesson, students use the photographic process to create a double-exposed photo then create...

As part of their exploration of the American dream, class members examine primary source materials to compare immigrant experiences of those arriving early in our country's history to those arriving in the US after World War...