A definitive resource for your figurative language unit includes several worksheets and activities to reinforce writing skills. It addresses poetic elements such as simile and metaphor, personification, hyperbole, and idioms, and...

Who says that reading has to involve text? Use non-print texts, including videos, TED talks, and podcasts in your classroom to teach skills associated with nonfiction reading, including evaluating claims, finding main ideas, and...

Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" serves as a model for a poetry analysis activity. The whole class critiques the sample and then groups select a poem and prepare a PowerPoint presentation in which they illustrate how their poet...

On Behalf of Others focuses on the work of writers, photographers, and artists who document "events, people, and places that might otherwise go unnoticed." After examining a photo essay by a New York Times journalist, a suite of images...

Tired of those blank stares after your class reads a particularly complex passage from a Shakespearean play? Help high schoolers untangle that prose with a literature circle activity. Ten different roles prompt class members to focus on...

Wouldn't it be great to live an a community without pain, without danger? Such a society is the goal of the community in The Giver. Using Lois Lowry's dystopian novel as the core text, class members read primary source materials about...

Your high schoolers are probably versed in two languages: formal language, and informal conversation. Help them identify the correct language style for their audience and context with a thorough lesson and examples of different speech...

How can word choice affect a political speech? Middle and high schoolers examine the text of the 1999 State of the Union Address, and then determine how newspaper articles and television reports describe and analyze the event. Use this...

What will your class members see in Sylvia Plath's "Mirror"? After reading the poem, learners engage in a Socratic seminar prompted by the provided questions. Individuals then create an illustration, focusing on the personification and...

Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy (Act III, scene i) gets the close reading treatment in a group of skill building exercises. As an engagement activity, class members assume the role of a WWE wrestler, a kindergarten teacher, ninja...