What a Garden Can Teach

Encourage narrative writing with a clever exercise. Class members watch episodes from movies and describe what happened to a character, including details about the setting, plot, and characters. Writers then craft a narrative about a...

Get your writers composing their own short stories by following some or all of the ideas included here. You'll find short lessons and activities, handouts and assignment pages, sample paragraphs and sentences, and all sorts of great...

For many children around the world, food scarcity is a painful reality of daily life. Help young scholars understand the seriousness of this global issue with with a reading of the book The Good Garden. After discussing food security and...

What is the difference between prejudice and discrimination? Between collaborators and bystanders? Guilt and responsibility? Prompt learners to think critically about a very complex and textured topic with an innovative packet of materials.

How can you define the greatness of a novel? Have kids evaluate A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines in the context of other literature that they consider to be great. Once they discuss whether the novel will stand the test of time,...

Sophia's War, Avi's novel that tracks the adventures of Sophia Calderwood, a fictional character, as well as the true stories of British Major John Andre and General Benedict Arnold during the American Revolution, is the anchor text of...

Take your reading group to the next level with a group discussion about what makes a book great. After finishing Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, learners make a class list of characteristics that define a book's greatness. They then break...

Strengthen your high schoolers' writing with a series of steps for writing successfully. With sections on organizing an essay, choosing a topic, crafting a thesis statement, and revising a draft, the lesson encourages your class to...

Tone is a tough topic to teach to teenagers. But never, fear, help is here in the form of a unit plan that takes advantage of their interest in music to set the stage for a series of activities that lead them to understand how setting,...

What does it take to persuade people? Aristotle has famously summarized rhetoric as three means of persuasion: logos, ethos, and pathos. Watch as these elements are explained in detail, and prompt your class to consider how to build the...