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Lesson Plan
John F. Kennedy Center

Folktale Theatre

For Teachers 5th - 7th
Introduce your middle schoolers to a performance and movement activity that uses their favorite stories from fairytales and folklore. They practice basic acting skills, create dialogues with a partner, and then as guided practice,...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Kumeyaay Indians

For Teachers 6th - 8th
Useful for literary analysis, citing textual evidence, or summary skills, this lesson about the Kumeyaay Indians would be a good addition to your language arts class. Middle schoolers read novels and summarize the literature in their own...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Theater: Create a Script

For Teachers 2nd - 6th
Figurative language is the focus in the book Teach Us, Amelia Bedelia. After reading Peggy Parish's book, class members dramatize idioms from the text, using dramatic strategies such as characterization, exaggeration, and improvisation....
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Unit Plan
Gwinnett County Public Schools

Analysis of the Tuck Everlasting and The Birchbark House Text Exemplars

For Teachers 4th - 6th Standards
Looking to introduce some text-based questions into your ELA lessons? Practice the kinds of skills the Common Core demands with the seven text-based questions and the essay prompt provided here. Designed to be a three-day lesson, day one...
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Activity
Curated OER

Express Yourself Lesson Seed 13: Character Development 2

For Teachers 6th Standards
Building upon prior lessons in the series, this reading and writing exercise requires pupils to look back at their own writing, track character development in the novel The Cay, and analyze how Phillip has changed. The reading focus is...
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Activity
Syracuse City School District

Literary Elements

For Teachers 5th - 7th
Address the literary elements in a piece of writing using these materials. The packet includes plenty of resources, and focuses mainly on theme, character, and point of view, with some materials for setting, symbolism, and author's...
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Worksheet
K12 Reader

Yeats and the Poetry of Ireland

For Students 6th - 10th Standards
W.B. Yeats' poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is featured on a worksheet that asks readers to respond to a series of reading comprehension questions.
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Unit Plan
ReadWriteThink

Beyond the Story: A Dickens of a Party

For Teachers 6th - 8th Standards
It's time to party like it's 1899! Incorporate a research-based celebration of the Victorian Era into your unit on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. After learners read the novella or view a production of the play, they craft a...
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Lesson Plan
Roald Dahl

Matilda - Bruce Bogtrotter and the Cake

For Teachers 3rd - 7th Standards
After reading the 11th chapter in Matilda, class members take on the role of Bruce Bogtrotter and re-enact the cake eating scene. Here's the catch: they must come-up with an impromptu re-enactment of the scene from the story, and use...
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Lesson Plan
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Roald Dahl

Matilda - Miss Trunchbull

For Teachers 3rd - 7th Standards
How would you react to the Trunchbull if she was your teacher? This is the focus of an activity that has readers imagining and then acting out their reactions to various Trunchball scenarios in the story.
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Heartsongs Poetry by Mattie Stepanek

For Teachers 4th - 6th
Use Mattie Stepanek’s Heartsongs book of poetry to inspire young poets to write about their own lives, experiences, and feelings. After reading the introduction to Mattie’s book, in which he talks about himself and his reasons for...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Reliving History through Slave Narratives

For Teachers 5th - 9th
Helpful for an American literature or history unit, this lesson prompts middle schoolers to examine slavery in the United States. They read slave narratives that were part of the Federal Writers' Project and then conduct their own...
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Activity
Curated OER

Express Yourself Lesson Seed 15: Theme

For Teachers 6th Standards
Build understanding of theme with an activity designed for The Cay and the Common Core. Small groups or pairs use graphic organizers to determine themes, find and record related details from the text, and formulate theme statements. In...
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Activity
Curated OER

Express Yourself Lesson Seed 11: Setting

For Teachers 6th Standards
Encourage your learners to examine the setting in Theodore Taylor's The Cay. Pupils work in small groups to put together a description of the setting before reading two more chapters of the book. They use their double-entry journals to...
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Activity
Curated OER

Express Yourself Lesson Seed 14: Dedication

For Teachers 6th Standards
Connect Martin Luther King Jr's famous speech, "I Have a Dream," to The Cay by Theodore Taylor. Taylor refers to the speech in his dedication, which creates a natural segue into talking about the speech and how it relates to the novel....
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Activity
Curated OER

Express Yourself Lesson Seed 12: Story Event

For Teachers 6th Standards
Focus on plot and the impact-specific events in The Cay. Class members use their double-entry journals, created in a previous lesson in this series, to record their thinking about the guiding question as they read chapters 15 through 17....
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Activity
Curated OER

Express Yourself Lesson Seed 19: Synthesis

For Teachers 6th Standards
Wrap up your unit on The Cay with an engaging argumentative writing assignment. Writers must decide if they believe The Cay should be banned. The resource includes links to several articles, which have been addressed and examined in...
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Lesson Plan
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Write Away!

Voices In the Park

For Teachers 1st - 6th Standards
Explore the impact a narrator's point of view has on a story with a reading of the children's book, Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne. Written in four different voices, the story is told and retold from different perspectives to...
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Lesson Plan
Pearson Longman

Emotions Reading

For Teachers 2nd - 6th Standards
Explore the many types of feelings and how people express them with a lesson compiled of kid-friendly activities that spark critical thinking, self-reflection, and reinforce language and writing skills. Scholars delve into the variety of...
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Lesson Plan
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Star Wars in the Classroom

"Shakespeare and Star Wars": Lesson Plan Day 12

For Teachers 6th - 12th Standards
Class members compare the final 30 minutes of Lucas's Star Wars: A New Hope with Act V of Doescher's play, William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope and consider how the choice of media influences viewers' impression of the...
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Lesson Plan
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Roald Dahl

Matilda - The Ghost

For Teachers 3rd - 7th Standards
How do you think the parrot in "The Ghost" chapter of Matilda feels in the chimney? Put a class member in the hot seat and have the class ask questions relating to how they might have felt if they were the parrot in the chimney. Then,...
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Lesson Plan
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Roald Dahl

Matilda - The Platinum-Blond Man

For Teachers 3rd - 7th Standards
Before reading Chapter Six, "The Platinum-Blond Man" in Matilda, readers preview the illustration of Mrs. Wormwood dropping her plate of food, and think about what may have happened to cause the scene. After reading the chapter, class...
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Lesson Plan
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Roald Dahl

Matilda - Miss Honey and The Trunchbull

For Teachers 3rd - 7th Standards
As the instructor reads aloud several quotes from five chapters of the story Matilda, class members mime their interpretation of the scenes. Then, after reading "Miss Honey" and "The Trenchbull" (chapters seven and eight), the class...
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Lesson Plan
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Roald Dahl

Matilda - The Weekly Test

For Teachers 3rd - 7th Standards
Readers take the main characters in Matilda and individually describe them through a mnemonic. To get there, group members create an acrostic poem describing the character they were given, and choose one of the words from the acrostic...

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