Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" engages adolescents with its theme about the dangers of complete societal equality. Learners complete a graphic organizer to track literary elements in the story, as well as an inference...

Asking questions about the text is a great way for kids to become self-sufficient readers. Use the question-and-response strategy (QAR) to get them thinking about John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. After they read select...

Writing poetry in ancient China was the modern equivalent of sending a greeting card. Scholars learn about the ancient Chinese poetic form called the lu shih. They read about the context of poetry during the T'ang Dynasty and complete a...

Is it crazy to fall in love with your own work, or is that the purest love of all? Compare two renditions of the classic Greek myth Pygmalion and Galatea with a literary analysis exercise. After students compare the similarities and...

Parental relationships have a huge impact on our personalities, for better or for worse. Read about Mike's relationship with his father in H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights and how it informed the novel's central idea.

Let your class voice their opinions with a group debate activity. Before reading John Milton's Paradise Lost, they work in small groups in assigned roles to form a position about authority and rebellion, comparing a...

As writers continue to revise their argument essays, the focus shifts to editing grammatical conventions, parallel structure, and varying syntax to add interest. After examining model sentences that demonstrate sentence variety, writers...

Hold a discussion in writing about coping strategies to prepare your pupils for reading Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science by John Fleischman. After journaling, pupils come up in an organized fashion and write...

To be or not to be? That's not the question in this presentation, but it features ways to use the forms of to be in other questions. A great addition to your grammar unit.

Good discussion questions, quizzes, and tests teach as well as assess. Readers of The Great Gatsby will learn much from the materials in a 36-page packet designed to help students prepare for the AP Literature exam. Included in the...

Set your pupils up to start on geometry by teaching them some introductory terminology. Pupils learn the terms by reading a short passage and looking at examples. They then respond to five questions related to the text.

Walk your class through the process of writing compare and contrast essays with this easy-to-use graphic organizer. After first using the included Venn diagram to record the similarities and differences between two subjects,...

If you're looking to start a unit based around narrative writing, make sure to consider this resource while you're planning. This book covers five topics: writing personal narratives, writing narratives about others, writing...

Chapter nine of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath provides the text for an exercise that asks readers to think deeply about the items the Joads left behind and what these items might represent.

Teenagers get the real information about marijuana use based on the history of tobacco legislation and research. As they read an educational passage about marijuana laws, science, and changing attitudes, they address their preconceptions...