I Am Death: Views of Death and Afterlife in Three British Poems, Part One: John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 10"

Judge Learned Hand's "Spirit of Liberty" speech delivered during the July, 1944 "I Am an American Day" celebration is the subject of a close reading activity that models for learners how to approach a dense, difficult text.

While learners only hear one speech, they set the stage for critical analysis and textual comparison. They discuss rhetoric, figurative language, and word choice as they listen to a civil rights speech read by John F. Kennedy. They...

Kurt Vonnegut's letter, addressed to Drake High School Board President Charles McCarthy, written in response to the board ordered burning of Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, is the focus of a comprehension exercise that asks...

Examine Buck and the point of view of the narrator in Jack London's The Call of the Wild. Start off with small group discussion. The plan provides three passages for group members to analyze. Next, ask individuals to flip the...

Imagery is the focus of this lesson, featuring "The Moon is distant from the Sea" by Emily Dickinson. Readers discuss the lunar cycle and its connection to the speaker's desires, and then choose an image from the poem to compare to their...

Extend your instruction on similes and metaphors with a lesson on Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" and "There is no Frigate like a Book." After a discussion on the images of each poem and their meanings, kids write an...

"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth." Just who is this "I"? In the third of ten-lesson unit that uses The Things They Carried as the anchor text, class members...

“I am. I think. I will.” Seek the secrets of words. Ayn Rand’s Anthem provides the text for a series of exercises that ask readers to analyze how Rand uses antimetabole, epistrophe, parallelism, and repetition to create meaning. Using...

Allusion can be a difficult concept for pupils to grasp. Home in on two brief poems by Edgar Allan Poe, "To Helen" and "Sonnet–To Science," with allusion in mind. Class members discuss the relationship of classical Greece and Rome to the...

Can beautiful words change the world? Literary scholars discover how to paint their visions of change using poetry in a series of three workshops. Each independent topic gives participants a chance to examine their feelings about...