John Knowles' A Separate Peace provides readers with an opportunity to develop their close reading and analytical skills as they look for what Knowles feels are the factors that shape our identity.

Asking questions about a text is an effective way to improve reading comprehension. Apply the Question Answer Response strategy to your unit on William Shakespeare's The Tempest. As kids read each passage, they decide if the answer...

As class members continue their study of approaches to literary criticism, readers examine the symbolism and archetypal patterns in John Knowles' A Separate Peace, and how these parallels are used to develop a theme...

Drama and story elements go hand-in-hand. Have the class dive into a dramatic play to show character intention, conflict resolution, main events, and the dialogue in a Hawaiian folk tale. They read the story, then group-up to...

How affected is Thinks Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe's personal biography? Using a four corners strategy, and evidence from their readings, class members debate the degree of biographical influence in Achebe's novel.

A puzzle isn't about the individual pieces, but how they work together. Scholars assemble a puzzle and discover missing pieces. They write a description of what they expect these pieces to look like, including as many details as...

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is an illustrative source of rich prose, deep character development, and strong literary themes. Use two of the book's key chapters, which focus on Waverly's relationship with chess and with her mother, to...

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club brings together the central ideas of identity, ambition, expectations, and relationships. As high schoolers read an excerpt from the chapter "Two Kinds," they note how Jing-Mei's connection to music relates to...

Plot, setting, characters, and conflict are common to both drama and narrative stories. Kids create narrated tableaus that show their understanding of the plot, setting, and conflict of a story they've recently read. The lesson...

The United States—specifically John F. Kennedy—played a large role during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A history resource poses questions that encourage critical thinking as well as in-depth analysis of images from the time period.

Readers apply Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious mind and the psychological approach to literary criticism to analyze and evaluate the relationship between two characters in A Separate Peace.

"How does our environment shape our identity?" After researching biographical information about John Knowles and considering how these experiences are reflected in A Separate Peace, class members consider the strengths and weaknesses of...

Media texts convey both overt and implied messages. As part of their study of media, class members analyze the language, form, techniques, and aesthetics in a variety of media texts.

Despite some advances made during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, the period from 1887 through 1929, African Americans serving in Congress suffered severe setbacks due to Jim Crow Laws and voter suppression. Class members...

Newspapers aren't only for reading—they're for learning skills, too! A journalism unit provides three lessons each for primary, intermediate, and secondary grades. Lessons include objectives, materials, vocabulary, and procedure, and...

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs provides the lens class members use to analyze and evaluate the motivations of the characters in Sylvia Plath's "Initiation" and scenes from Mean Girls. Readers then select a character from A...

Are you in need of a new way to teach learners sequence of events and how to interpret a character's external motivations? Why not engage them in dramatic play? The class will use tableaux to convey the sequence of events in a familiar...

How is religious freedom connected to the conflict between China and Tibet? After reading an online passage of background information, your learners will divide into groups and both read and view an interview with the Dalai Lama. They...

This multimedia activity challenges media-savvy learners to look at the critical issue concerning the inundation of technology and multitasking in the classroom, and its effects on the education of themselves and others. The tasks...

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the most frequently cited novel for the Advanced Placement Literature and Composition Open Response Question. Those new to using the book and and veterans as well will find the teaching strategies, the...

For scholars tired of reading the textbook, this unit includes nine hands-on lessons. Through group work, lab activities, experiments, and even one inquiry-based lesson, scholars apply knowledge about cells, genetics, and...

According to the Mauna Loa observatory, carbon dioxide levels increased by 3 ppm in our atmosphere between 2015–2016. Individuals analyze carbon dioxide data from around the world and then share this with a home group in lesson...

When it comes to the law, is justice always served? Teach scholars about how law sometimes enables prejudice of entire groups of people with a unit on World War II that includes a warm-up activity, analysis of primary sources,...

Don't shine like a diamond, refract light like a diamond. Young scientists use an acrylic block and a laser light to observe refraction. Advanced scholars figure the sine of the angles of reflection and incidence as well as mastering...