"You're in the Spotlight"

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles provides the text for a fishbowl activity. Class members to sit in concentric circles, with the center circle discussing the topics from the book, and the outer circle observing the...

Which do you use: that or this? Which or where? Me or I? Practice pronoun use with a series of activities that focus on personal and demonstrative pronouns.

Great literature discussions are a consequence of carefully crafted questions, interpretative questions that permit more than one response, and responses supported by specific evidence from the text. The discussion questions in a guide...

The challenge in telephone conversations is that speakers and listeners cannot rely on body language to communicate. This 31-page packet includes a curriculum guide, lesson plans, assessments, and resource lists designed to help...

Readers learn together with a group discussion activity. As they read William Shakespeare's The Tempest, high schoolers prepare for a fishbowl discussion in which three or four learners sit in the middle of a large circle and...

After reading through Act II of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, take some time to discuss the references to death in the play. For this fishbowl discussion, learners prepare questions, practice answering individually and with...

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, can seem strangely prophetic when compared to modern news events and politics. Readers of Orwell's dystopian classic sharpen their critical thinking skills by engaging in...

Improve high schoolers' public speaking with an engaging activity. Class members select three personally relevant quotes from a list. They then write a short speech for each quote, explaining how the quotes are personally relevant....

Learners will share ideas about class mobility. They create a timeline that chronicles milestones in their own lives, and synthesize their learning by writing personal essays about their class status and aspirations for the future.

The ambiguity in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre makes the novel a perfect choice for a shared inquiry discussion. Readers respond to open-ended questions with evidence drawn directly from the text.