Poetry: Back to School Lesson

Readers learn about sharecropping in the South in a unit about Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying. Focusing on the period after Civil War Reconstruction but before the Civil Rights Movement, a set of handouts help to establish the...

As part of their exploration of the American dream, class members examine primary source materials to compare immigrant experiences of those arriving early in our country's history to those arriving in the US after World War II. To...

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...

Whether you are viewing a landscape painting of a farm, examining a still-life portrait of a bowl of fruit, or reading a descriptive poem about cultivating food, you can't deny that agriculture plays a major role in visual and language...

Continue analyzing literature using textual evidence with a lesson focused on "I Felt A Funeral, in my Brain" by Emily Dickinson. Ninth graders bring their annotation skills and knowledge of figurative language from the previous...

Identify the unique personal attributes of your class members. Begin by viewing the Visual Thesaurus and discussing displayed attributes associated with famous American leaders. Using these identity maps as models, pupils generate nouns...

Assess your new learners' writing abilities and knowledge of literary terms with these diagnostic activities. Part of a back-to-school unit, this is meant to provide the teacher with information about the ability levels of their class....

Foster community in your classroom and encourage learners to get up and get to know each other. Individuals each receive the classmate inventory handout included and use it to fill in information about their fellow scholars. Once they...

Jump back into expository writing and analysis at the start of a new school year! Start with a review of an authors' stylistic choices in diction, syntax, treatment of subject matter, and figurative language. Writers choose a text to...

Numerous people from China immigrated to the US during the era of industrialization and expansion. Provide your class with a glimpse into the life of a Chinese immigrant through the poetry they left behind. They then compose a poem of...