Scholars analyze fiction and nonfiction text and fill in a worksheet detailing the text's title, genre, and reason for its classification.

What better way to explain the concept of point of view than from an ant's perspective! After reading Two Bad Ants, pupils identify the point of view of the ants by studying the text and pictures. Then, they fill out a...

The Boston Massacre may be an iconic event in American history, but perhaps the British soldiers had another point of view. Using primary sources, including reports from Boston newspapers and secondary sources from the British...

Point of view, purpose, and tone: three concepts readers of primary and secondary source materials must take into account when examining documents. Class members view a PowerPoint presentation and use the SOAPS strategy to identify an...

From A to Z, learners define, draw, and find examples of specific reading focus skills in an alphabetized reading vocabulary packet. Words include dialogue, theme, text structure, genre, paraphrase, and many more.

While the Spanish claimed to bring civilization to California indigenous peoples, in reality, they also brought violence and forced assimilation to European values. Primary sources, such as the reports of Catholic priests and Europeans...

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...

Use the Visual Thesaurus to predict the subject matter of Rick Riordan's book The Lightning Thief. A pre-reading activity encourages middle schoolers to use context clues and word meaning to discover what the book is about. After...

Enter the world of Harry Potter and learn new vocabulary at the same time. A high-interest reading passage provides insight into the history of Harry Potter. Follow-up activities incorporate key vocabulary strategies, such as using...

Prompt your young historians to hone in their reading comprehension skills by considering the fascinating perspective that Rudyard Kipling offers in his poem, "The American Rebellion", which provides an alternative...

Analyze the federal government's direct response to the Whiskey Rebellion through this fantastic primary source analysis activity worksheet.

After analyzing newspaper articles portraying different perspectives of the explosion of the Battleship USS Maine, your young historians will take a stand on which position is the most believable in both discussion and writing.

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...

Reading snail mail is a great way to go back into history and to understand others' points of view. The resource, the second in a five-part unit, covers the Dreyfus Affair. Scholars, working in two different groups, read one letter and...

Learners read independently the novel, "Dragonwings," by Laurence Yep and make connections between a text and the world. They summarize, paraphrase, analyze and evaluate skimming and scanning techniques when reading a novel. Each student...

Was Nat Turner a hero or a violent criminal? Using primary sources and images that discuss the rebellion of enslaved people he led in antebellum Virginia, scholars consider the question. Then, they create memorials to Turner and...

Poems by O. Henry, Marion Dane Bauer, Monty Roberts, and Langston Hughes provide the text for a study of symbolism, hyperbole, and imagery. Employing the “think-pair-share” strategy learners generate definitions of these terms and locate...

Young historians practice in-depth, quality analysis of primary source texts in this three-lesson unit, which examines excerpts from the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Caleb...

Analyze a fictional text with a four-page packet that explores a story's main character and moral, challenges scholars to ask and answer questions about the text, and to create a story map. 

The main idea of this resource is that you should take a look if you're planning to teach main ideas in your class! Cover just about everything you need to know about main ideas with a packet of materials that includes information and...

As the saying goes: there are no new stories. Standard 9 for reading literature in the Common Core addresses this fact and requires that students be able to analyze how authors use the themes, stories, and characters of earlier works....

Learners study personification and alliteration in various fiction texts. For this literary devices lesson, students use various texts to identify the literary devices of personification and alliteration. Learners use examples of both...

Read an article about the migration of our ancestors and write a paragraph. Pupils paraphrase and summarize to restate the information found in a nonfiction text. They write a shortened version of the reading to demonstrate the...

Learners make predictions. In this language arts lesson plan, students read nonfiction texts and make predictions about what they are going to read. Learners confirm and revise their predictions as they read the text.