A Report From the 21st Century - Mark Twain

It's the classic scene: Tom Sawyer is whitewashing a fence. Expose your learners to Mark Twain's humor while reinforcing reading comprehension. Eighth graders are encouraged to read and reread, achieving as much exposure to the text as...

Offer your class methods for understanding and creating setting in a written work. Much of the focus here is on fluency, so class members spend a good amount of time simply writing about places that are significant to them, and...

Compare real events from Mark Twain's life to events in the story. Middle school readers identify point-of-view, its purpose, and its reliability by citing two examples. They describe the tone of the story using four examples and...

By digitally organizing research, your class leaves a legacy for future students on the life and times of Mark Twain. Before reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, scholars conduct group research projects on one of six (listed) topics....

Mark Twain's life, politics, writing, and role as a mirror of pre- and post-Civil War American culture are the focus 11th and 12th graders in this section from an expansive author study. A critical writing assignment comparing Twain to...

A passage from Mark Twain’s Roughing It, in which he describes an incident that occurred during his visit to the Hawaiian Islands, is used as the basis of a reading comprehension quiz. Pupils must read carefully and access the provided...

Does Mark Twain’s satire become sarcasm and does he cross the line of propriety in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? As an introduction of satire, class members view an excerpt from The Daily Show and discuss Stewart's use of this...

Nathaniel Hawthorne as a humorist? Really? The three lessons in this series focus on the the storytelling style, conventions, and literary techniques employed by Hawthorne, George Washington Harris, and Mark Twain. 

Mark Twain's Corn-Pone Opinions serves as the text for a reading comprehension quiz, but could also serve to launch a dynamic discussion of the opinions put forth in the passage. Do you agree that our opinions are born of the human...

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is famous, in part, because it established a uniquely American form of humor. In this famous story, Mark Twain combines the tall-tale, the dialect story, and satire. Here is a resource...