Nazi policies shifted from deportation and imprisonment to extermination of the Jewish people in death camps in the "Final Solution." Learners examine photos of artifacts, read poetry written by survivors, analyze testimony from...

Engage your class in the elements of poetry with a series of lessons and activities. The plans cover simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and imagery. Learners come up their their own metaphors, identify poetic...

Learn about the characters of Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting with a character biopoem. Readers fill in a poem format to detail the character traits of Winnie, Jesse, Miles, and Mae, and share their finished poems...

The Buttonhook by Mary Jo Salter is the focus of a unit that explores the immigration experience to Ellis Island. First, scholars bring in an artifact that represents their heritage. A group-exercise allows them to share and discuss...

Although some African American abolitionists—such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass—are well known, others, like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, remain in the shadows of history. Harper was a poet and activist who played an...

Bells, bells, bells abound in a worksheet designed for Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem "The Bells." Middle schoolers are asked to identify the various poetic devices Poe employs.

Primary source texts provide scholars with the background information they need to understand why Chinese peasant farmers were driven to emigrate. After underlining keywords, phrases, and/or lines in the texts, individuals craft a...

A reading adventure pack, featuring a fiction and nonfiction book focuses on the weather. Scholars read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett and Seymour Simon and then complete three creative activities. Participants craft...

Here is a unit consisting of activities designed to challenge your scholars. The extended learning opportunities include planning a celebration, making a presentation to the class, poster making, writing poetry, a problem-solving...

What was it like to live through the Civil War? Learners investigate the question by creating multimedia presentations. With a scaffolded approach that includes research, creating a biopic poem, storyboard, and then polished multimedia...

Jazz and the City, Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement, Jazz and Gender, Jazz and Literature, Jazz and the Arts, Jazz and Film. Here's a packet of unit plans organized around themes that reflect American culture. Each unit examines how...

Students expand their understanding and appreciation for poetry. In this poetry unit lesson, students complete 5 unit sections of multiple day activities to learn about poetry and its devices or forms.

In need of a few great ways to teach an arts-enriched lesson on astronomy? This resource contains several interesting ideas that link poetry to the stars in the sky. These suggestions are very simple and could use a teachers touch, but...

Students observe an object in nature and record them. In groups, they create a group poem about the same object. They create their own poem based on another object using other their senses to help them. They share their poems with the...

Young scholars discuss phrases and words from a poem.  In this understanding poetry lesson, students are given a word or phrase from a poem on an index card.  Young scholars circulate around the room discussing their phrases...

In this poetry worksheet, students complete multiple choice questions on different aspects of poetry. Students complete 40 questions total.

How can you tell if someone is happy? The lesson works with elementary and middle school scholars to activate their schema and pay attention to details to make inferences in their daily lives, poetry, and other literature. Cleverly...

Your class can participate in a writing program involving four building blocks. By exploring words, sentences, writing forms, and story organization, they improve their creative writing skills throughout this year-long unit. Early in the...

Alliteration and imagery are two vital parts of any well-written poem. Encourage your young poets to include these devices with a set of activities designed to get them thinking, writing, and creating.

Historical poetry is lyrical in form and rich with content. After examining the differences between the Northern and Southern states before and during the U.S. Civil War, learners complete a Venn diagram and create an illustration of the...

Second graders examine several examples of poetry in the six lessons of this unit. The lessons focus on five poetic forms, couplets, quatrains, limericks, Haiku, and free verse.

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...

Sixth graders are introduced to poems written by African-American authors. As a class, they read excerpts of poems from different time periods and discuss how and if anything has changed over time with discrimination and equal rights...

Students are introduced to the elements of African-American poetry. As a class, they are read different types of poems to discover there are different styles of poems and practice rhyming words. They share information on their family...