Writers work on creating a plan for their end-of-unit essay of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass using a Frederick Douglass Essay Planner to help guide their thought process. They then regroup as a class to...

How does an author develop and contrast character points of view in a work of literature? Using a graphic organizer, readers continue gathering evidence about character point of view from Linda Sue Park's A Long Walk to Water. Next,...

A reading of Robert Frost’s "The Road Not Taken" launches an interdisciplinary study of the connection between the meters of a poem and a melody. After identifying the number of beats in each line of the poem, young musicians use...

Focus on vocabulary, comprehension, and analysis while reading A Weave of Woods, a colorful picture book by Robert D. San Souci. Young learners use worksheets to preview, predict, practice paraphrasing, and make comparisons. The...

Third graders construct numbers to the millions place. In this 30-page place value instructional activity, learners create numbers and evaluate the place value of digits. They explore standard and expanded form of numbers. An incredible...

Explore the measures of central tendency through a challenging task. Given values for the mean, median, mode, and range, collaborative groups create a set of data that would produce those values. They then critique other answers and...

Word roots, prefixes, and suffixes can hold the key to determining the meaning of a host of different words. Included here are five pages of prefixes, roots, and suffixes paired with their meanings and example words.

Fighting a war over home soil makes a living nightmare even more real. Class members describe the experience of a Civil War soldier during the Battle of Franklin, poised right at a major turning point of the war, after researching the...

If you're tired of defining allusion, onomatopoeia, and satire for your language arts students, hand out a complete list of literary devices to keep the terms straight. Each term includes a definition that is easy to understand and...

Moving to a new country isn't easy, as Shirley Temple Wong learns in In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord. A series of language arts activities carry readers through the novel, addressing the story's themes,...

Considering using The Sun Also Rises as a whole-class or book circle choice? Check out this overview and interesting interpretation of Hemingway's tale.

Put your common writing errors to rest with this resource, which prompts high schoolers to create eulogies and tombstones for overused and incorrect words. They work on correcting common errors in spelling and usage mistakes in their own...

Outlines are a great asset to essay planning. Scholars read and analyze a model essay about the importance of daily reading and consider how it would look in an outline format. Next, they outline their own informative essays about rules...

Students examine Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fireside Chats. In this presidential history lesson, students listen to the radio broadcasts of select FDR Fireside Chats. Students analyze the effectiveness of his messages to the public as well...

Improve word choice! Writers use dictionaries and thesauruses to aid them in choosing exciting words to incorporate in their writing. They rewrite sentences and practice identifying words that can be replaced using a better word....

Scholars research and present on the historical happenings of 1919. After sharing their findings, pupils debate about how Congress dealt with the moral issues of the time. The evaluation asks learners to write a persuasive...

Turning 11 comes with a range of emotions. Explore those emotions by reading the short story "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros. Readers analyze the main character's reactions to the events of her day. Then, they write an essay describing what...

Readers of The Autobiography of Malcolm X continue their analysis of the methods Haley uses to show how Malcolm X is changing due to his exposure to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad.

Close the unit on Esperanza Rising with an in-class analytic essay on how Esperanza changes over the course of the novel. Writers can use any of their notes and work from the unit as well as their drafts of the first two paragraphs of...

What does social security reveal about the political and social culture of the 1930s? After beginning with a brief introductory video on the impact of the Great Depression and how various Americans, such as Huey Long and Francis...

The world is a stage, and so is your classroom! Hone the skills of the next generation of Tony® award winners with a set of exercises, reference pages, writing prompts, and excerpts from famous plays.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" provides the text for an activity that asks readers to select specific passages from the story, identify the aspect of American Romanticism the passage exemplifies, and then provide an...

In terms of crossword puzzles, this one on the periodic table of elements and atomic structure has some value. Twenty questions must be answered to complete the puzzle, but be sure to warn learners that when an answer requires two words,...

See what peers really think. Scholars give a peer critique of the their essay drafts from the previous lesson. They then participate in a mini lesson about pronouns. Pupils write examples of each type of pronoun on sticky notes and put...