Night: Unsent Letters Writing Strategy

To demonstrate their ability to comprehend complex text, ninth graders are asked to craft an essay in which they use evidence drawn from "Letter From Birmingham Jail" to analyze how Martin Luther King, Jr. uses rhetorical devices...

Readers of Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida place themselves in the story and craft a persuasive letter to a character in Victor Martinez's National Book Award-winning novel.

After completing Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose, class members assume the voice of Gemma and craft a personal letter to her granddaughter telling Becca how she feels about Becca’s actions and the discoveries at Chelmno. Complete directions for...

Have you ever wanted to tell a character what you really thought of him or her? Use a lesson based on Kyoko Mori's Shizuko's Daughter to encourage learners to write a letter in response to a character's actions. 

To pique interest in The Last Lecture, readers are given a list of key terms and ask to craft a story inspired by the terms.

As part of a reading of Elie Wiesel's Night class members engage in a directed reading/thinking activity that includes crafting predictions, verifying these predictions, and interpreting portions of the text.

Readers of The House of the Scorpion try to stump their teacher in a QAR questioning game. Pairs craft Right There, Think and Search, On Your Own, and the Author and You questions and the class members then take turns responding to...

As part of a study of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, class members respond to, and craft, higher-level comprehension questions based on passages from the text. 

Readers learn to ask questions about text with an activity based on Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. As they read, class members craft questions based on Bloom's Taxonomy and then find the answers themselves.

A visual literary instructional activity provides learners with OPTIC (Observations, Predictions, Themes, Inferences, Conclusions), a reading strategy to help them understand and interpret visual and written texts. Scholars practice the...