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Worksheet
Curated OER

Concise Writing Exercises

For Students 7th - 11th
Are your pupils' essays full of long, wordy sentences? Help them to write more concise sentences with this practice worksheet, which provides twenty long sentences for your young editors to proofread. Use the activity as a homework...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Poetry Writing Unit: Writing a Film Poem

For Teachers 9th - 12th
Film poems? To concluded a poetry unit, writers select one of their own poems and create a film that brings to life the sounds and images of their work. Included with the detailed unit plan are daily lessons, student examples, a list of...
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Activity
Sandra Effinger

Bulletin Board Project

For Teachers 7th - 12th
Imagine a project that informs and entertains. Replace book reports with a bulletin board that highlights all the important elements of a novel. Readers research the author, create a timeline of events in the story, write a character...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Car For Sale!

For Teachers 9th - 12th
Car For sale! In this GED prep lesson, writers develop a classified advertisement to sell a car. After a discussion of precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language, sellers draft their ad for review, revision and...
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Lesson Plan
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Curated OER

Irish Eyes: Taking a Look at Local Landscape

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
Direct your class’s attention to the elements that make their community unique. After examining sample travel brochures, groups select something from their community to use as the subject, and then research, create, and publish a...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Persuasion and Parallel Structure

For Teachers 9th - 12th
Discuss the definition of parallel structure with your high school class. In small groups, they read a section of "The Declaration of Independence" to identify examples of parallel structure. Each learner writes an essay explaining the...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Compare and Contrast Poems vs. Lyrics

For Teachers 6th - 12th
Combine your pupils' love of music with their growing knowledge of poetry! First, have them bring in their favorite songs for a discussion on word choice and literary devices. Then, use a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the...
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Unit Plan
Los Angeles Unified School District

Capitalism and Socialism

For Students 9th - 12th Standards
Capitalism, socialism, communism ... these may seem like a whole bunch of isms to your scholars. High schoolers won't  confuse them after completing an informative resource. Your class masters how to use primary sources to critically...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Bringing the Line to Life

For Teachers 3rd - 11th
Students use different types and lengths of sentences. They write with an insight of the stylistic aspects of composition. Students use precise language including adjectives, adverbs, action verbs and specific details that convey the...
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Instructional Video3:14
TV411

Avoid Mushy Writing: Be Specific

For Students 7th - 12th Standards
Replacing, bland, inexact generalizations with specific statement and precise information is the focus of a worksheet that models how to transform general statements into specific ones. After examining four models, learners have an...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Confounding Words

For Teachers 11th
Eleventh graders gain understanding of how words in the English language are formed. They assess their own work for sentence clarity and variety of expression. They increase their comprehension and recall.
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Analyzing Persuasion

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
A reading of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech launches a study of rhetorical devices such as hyperbole, allusion, metaphor, simile, personification, connotative language and parallel structure. Class members then...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Defending Great Literature

For Teachers 9th - 12th
Students defend Mark Twain and the study of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn using persuasive techniques, appropriate word choice, and correct letter format, in response to a fictional letter by an upset parent.
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Lesson Plan
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Channel Islands Film

Island Rotation: Lesson Plan 3

For Teachers 9th - 12th Standards
How far have California's Channel islands moved? What was the rate of this movement? Class members first examine data that shows the age of the Hawaiian island chain and the average speed of the Pacific Plate. They then watch West of the...
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Activity
Curated OER

Things Fall Apart: Research, Writing & Presentation Project

For Teachers 9th - 11th
A great resource for your unit on Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Small groups conduct research about related topics (list included), write papers, present PowerPoint slide shows, and take a student-created test. Fill in a few gaps to...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

I See and I Think (It's A Wonderful World)

For Teachers 3rd - 11th
Students analyze song lyrics (by listening to the song) to pick-out descriptive vocabulary. They use this descriptive vocabulary to create a drawing of the images they "see" in the song. They compare their drawings to find similarities...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Said Is Dead

For Teachers 3rd - 11th
Learners revise writing to improve organization and word choice. They check for logic, order of ideas and precision of vocabulary. Students list different verbs for the word "said." They write dialogue in which the speakers tell a story...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Creatively Creating Expository Essays

For Teachers 7th - 12th
Young scholars, after reading Fahrenheit 451, brainstorm inventions that could have been in the novel. They present their invention to the class and writing an expository essay about their creation.
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Activity
Shmoop

ELA.CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1

For Teachers 11th - 12th Standards
Focus on writing argument essays with your high schoolers. The lesson suggested here focuses on The Jungle, by Sinclair Lewis; however, the idea could be adapted for other texts. Check out the quick quiz provided at the end of the...
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Worksheet
Curated OER

Do College Rankings Matter?

For Students 10th - 12th
How do you know which college is for you? Upper graders consider multiple factors about the college application process, the college system, and how colleges are ranked. They read a New York Times article on the subject then compose blog...
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Writing
Curated OER

What Do You Think of Obama's Oval Office Speech on the Oil Spill?

For Students 7th - 12th
Kids age 13 and older are asked to read the provided Times article and background information in order to construct a thoughtful blog response to Obama's first Oval Office speech. They work to address each of the related critical...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Transcendentalism and Epiphany in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine

For Teachers 12th
Twelfth graders examine the characteristics of transcendentalism. In this transcendentalism lesson, 12th graders determine what this type of writing entails before reading a passage from, Ray Bradbury's, Dandelion Wine. They cite three...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Jewish Assimilation In Contemporary American Literature

For Teachers 9th - 12th
Students form groups to help each other read, analyze, and conduct research on important background information about Jews and their assimilation into modern American society. They write their own stories of assimilation.
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

USA Today Reading Comprehension and Research Lesson

For Teachers 9th - 11th
Students read an article from USA Today and create a graphic to convey the information they've read. In this reading comprehension worksheet, students read an article and draw upon the information given to research and discuss the topic...