Curated OER
From Light to Dark and Back
Experiment with light and dark in a series of interactive activities that lead up to reading and writing poetry. Class members have the opportunity to observe their feelings while sitting in the light and dark and to play with shadow...
Pulitzer Center
"Voices from Haiti": Using Poetry to Speak up for a Cause
Explore a real world use of poetry with your class! Young language arts pupils consider the concept of advocacy and how journalism, photography, and poetry can raise awareness for a cause. They read several poems about individuals...
Curated OER
Agriculture Awareness Through Poetry
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...
Curated OER
Self-Monitoring Strategies and Vocabulary Games
Middle and high schoolers identify how to discover a word's meaning by exploring context clues and any pictures, diagrams, photographs, and charts that might be included. They continue this process with other examples and locate one on...
Curated OER
"Shooting an Elephant"
Study selected vocabulary terms in George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant." A chart includes five selections, and learners must record the connotative and denotative meaning for each. A great look at using the context to define vocabulary...
Curated OER
Flying Freudian Fun: A Look At Ethical Decision Making
There are not many more apt examples of ethics gone awry than William Golding's Lord of the Flies.. Ninth graders focus the ethics of decision making with the examples provided in the plot. They focus on the concept of the psyche and how...
National Endowment for the Humanities
Tales of the Supernatural
Scary stuff! Whether approached as the first horror story or a "serious imaginative exploration of the human condition," Frankenstein continues to engage readers. Here's a packet of activities that uses Mary Shelley's gothic novel to...
Curated OER
The Red Badge of Courage: A New Kind of Realism
Is it possible to tell a true war story? Tim O’Brien says that fiction is for “getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” To get at the truth about war, class members examine primary source materials from the...
Curated OER
Painting Places with Words Using John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
Useful in an Of Mice and Men unit, or in a unit that focuses on descriptive writing, this instructional activity prompts young authors to impersonate John Steinbeck's writing style in the opening passages of the novel. A Six Trait...
National Park Service
Petrified Forest National Park
Poetry Soup, a reading and writing unit constructed by the Petrified Forest National Park, will have scholars hungry to learn about nature. The cross-content unit contains topics related to history, science, and language arts. Content...
Maryland Department of Education
The Concept of Diversity in World Literature Lesson 6: Culture Clash
To prepare for a Quickwrite on the question, "How do different points of view create cultural conflicts?" class groups draw examples of religious, cultural, and political conflicts from Things Fall Apart and The Poisonwood Bible to use...
Novelinks
Count of Monte Cristo: Concept/Vocabulary Analysis
Explore the complex themes of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo with a concept and vocabulary analysis lesson plan. Lead your class in a discussion about the underlying social and historical issues surrounding the novel, as well...
Curated OER
Shizuko’s Daughter: Knowledge Rating Scale
How well do your kids know key terms from Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori? Have them review a list of words that they will encounter in the novel, and mark which words they know well, which words they've seen before, and which words...
Curated OER
Shizuko’s Daughter: List-Group-Label Strategy
Help your learners navigate the vocabulary of Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori with a instructional activity on categorizing words. After coming up with a list of things that grow from the earth, learners decide which categories each...
Curated OER
Shizuko’s Daughter: Before, During, After Lesson Plan
Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori presents a vivid picture of Japanese culture and history. As kids read through the third chapter, they find novel-specific vocabulary to enhance their understanding and use context clues to determine...
Poets.org
Ghosts and Spirits
Connect poetry to a naturally kid-friendly topic: ghosts! Draw on your class's prior knowledge of the paranormal to help them access the classic poem "Haunted House" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. After a fun warm-up activity describing...
National Endowment for the Humanities
Thirteen Ways of Reading a Modernist Poem
High schoolers analyze modernist poetry and the role of speaker in example poems. Learners study modernist poems from the Romanticism and Victorian periods as well as Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Using a...
National Endowment for the Humanities
Charles Baudelaire: Poète Maudit (The Cursed Poet)
After learning the main ideas of the Decadent movement, students work in small groups to read and translate poems by the French poet Charles Baudelaire using basic etymology skills. They then read the accurate English translations to see...
Curated OER
Create a Video Poem
Collaborate to create a visual version of a poem using video. Before class, choose a poem to pick apart. Read it aloud and then analyze it in detail as a class. Assign a line or short section to each student to expand upon using a...
Curated OER
"Tear him for his bad verses:" Cinna the poet and Shakespeare's Sonnets
Poor Cinna, the poet. His dream of “things unlucky” certainly comes true as the mob tears him apart, at first because they mistake him for Cinna, the conspirator, and then continue to “tear him to pieces for his bad verses.” As part of...