Star Wars in the Classroom
"Shakespeare and Star Wars": Lesson Plan Day 1
"Now is the summer of our happiness/Made winter by this sudden, fierce attack!" Luke Skywalker meets Hamlet in a 10-lesson unit based on Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope. Using Star Wars® as source...
Star Wars in the Classroom
"Shakespeare and Star Wars": Lesson Plan Day 4
Class members have an opportunity to compare how a film and a play handle the same source material by viewing the opening chapters of George Lucas's Star Wars: A New Hope and acts I and II of Ian Doescher's play, William Shakespeare's...
Curated OER
Lights, Camera, Action...Crossing the Delaware in 9 Scenes
How does reading a drama differ from reading a novel? Middle schoolers become playwrights and explore these differences. After viewing the A&E movie,"The Crossing," groups create stage directions, write dialogue, and design sets and...
EngageNY
Launching A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Identifying the Characters, Settings, and Conflicts
Scholars form a drama circle and begin reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. They also use a play map to identify the setting, characters, and conflicts from the text.
Curated OER
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
Students read a chapter in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and define new words for their dictionaries. In this vocabulary lesson students choose two or three assignment from a list of projects and complete it using the text in the...
Curated OER
Reliving History through Slave Narratives
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...
Curated OER
Theatre: Meaningful Monologues
Students perform dramatic monologues. In this drama instructional activity, students write their own monologue and perform it in front of their peers.
Ken Taylor
The Stones: Guilty or Not Guilty?
Young drama pupils will perform a number of expressive speaking exercises as they consider the themes of responsibility, consequences, and justice in the very modern Australian play The Stones. With a lot of role playing and...
Curated OER
Narrative Pantomime: The Great Kapok Tree
Students pantomime the story of The Great Kapok Tree for younger students. In this The Great Kapok Tree lesson, students warm up with a game before volunteering for parts in the story. Students practice acting out the story in...
Curated OER
Act It Out!
An effective way to demonstrate understanding is by synthesizing one's own work. Use a creative lesson designed for a unit on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun for small groups to show what they know about the play, its themes and...
Curated OER
"War of the Worlds": A Broadcast Re-Creation
Why did Orson Welles' 1938 Broadcast of a adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds cause such a panic? To answer this question, class members listen to the original broadcast and research the panic that resulted. They then engage...
Curated OER
Introducing the Olympian Gods
Students compare and contrast characteristics of the Olympians with the character of the One True God. In this mythology lesson students work in groups and are assigned one god and one myth to compare and contrast to God.
Curated OER
Creating a Science Fiction Story
As the culminating activity in a unit study of science fiction, young writers demonstrate their understanding of the genre by producing their own graphic novel. After deciding on the main elements of their story, individuals use a comic...