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...

Create 21st century learners by utilizing technology and library databases. Scholars explore the concept of comic books as literature and create a superhero who could uniquely solve a 21st century global issue. Databases such as SIRS are...

"First Appearance," Mark Twain's tale about overcoming stage fright, serves as a model of a personal narrative and gets young writers thinking about milestones in their own lives. After examining student models and considering the...

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...

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. 

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....

“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...

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...

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...

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...