Use the accompanying assessment to determine your class's prior knowledge on Martin Luther King, Jr. before beginning a lesson on the famous civil rights movement leader. The resource has young historians thinking about life for African...

Offer young scholars strategies for dealing with bullies with help from BrainPop Jr.'s favorite characters, Annie and Moby. Youngsters watch a video, take part in a grand conversation, and play a game designed to reinforce...

The concept of sight, whether it's a lack of sight or abundant sight of the future, plays a vital role in Sophocle's Oedipus the King. Develop your ninth graders' literary vision with a instructional activity that connects the prophecy...

Ninth graders demonstrate their understanding of a central idea in Oedipus the King with a mid-unit writing assessment. Writers formulate a claim about the connection between prophecy and Oedipus's actions and craft an in-class essay...

Ninth graders study the study of animals in an informational text lesson plan that focuses on analyzing text structure. As learners continue reading the first chapter of Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation, they form inquiries and...

As the first in a two-part, end-of-unit assessment that encourages readers to synthesize the unit's main ideas, class members review their notes for each of the three texts they read and develop three open-ended discussion questions...

A story about feral girls raised by werewolves will have some interesting character development! Track how the girls and their teachers act, speak, and change with a lesson focused on Karen Russell's "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by...

The balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet takes center stage as class members consider the structural choices Shakespeare makes, i.e., having Romeo appear first in the scene and having Juliet appear unaware that Romeo is listening to her...

Once conceived, a guided set of literary analysis lessons will assist you day and night. Ninth graders look closely at "The Tell-Tale Heart" and analyze how Poe uses point of view to create questions about the narrator's sanity and...

"We need forgiveness and someone to blame." True? Class members continue their analysis of the central claims in Walter Mosley's essay and the support he offers for these claims about people's fascination with crime.

How does Shakespeare use dialogue to develop the idea that the star-crossed lovers are more concerned with their relationship as individuals than they are with their roles as children of warring families? That is the question facing...

"O, I am fortune's fool!" As they continue their analysis of Act 3, scene 1, class members consider the role of fate in the events. The lesson concludes with a viewing of a brief portion of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, in which the...

Can authors speak to each other across works, genres, and centuries? Study the conversation between Christopher Marlowe in his poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and the responses by Sir Walter Raleigh and William Carlos Williams...

Put another set of eyes on your class's historical fiction narratives with one of the final lessons in the unit. Fourth graders use feedback from their peers to annotate their drafts for revision, particularly their bold beginnings and...

An engaging unit connects Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson's shared themes of madness and departure from reality. The 10th lesson in the unit explores Dickinson's figurative language and structure choices in "I Felt a Funeral, in my...

The slow curse of realization begins to sink in during the tenth lesson in a literary analysis unit on Sophocles' Oedipus the King. Ninth graders carefully read the selected lines for evidence of Oedipus' feelings during a turning point...

To prepare for the unit's final assessment essay, class members collaborate to find evidence that reveals Romeo and Juliet as tragic heroes.

Get young writers thinking about how to write a great beginning for their narratives. After examining examples of solid beginnings in literary text, young writers discuss the criteria for a compelling introduction. Then, independently,...

Wrap up your literary analysis unit with a discussion activity as tenth graders prepare for an end-of-unit assessment. After they have read and annotated Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepard to His Love," Sir Walter Raleigh's...

What are the qualities of a strong written response to a prompt? Class members use the provided text analysis rubric to self-assess their responses to their homework assignments to prepare for the mid-unit assessment.

During the eighth lesson in a historical fiction unit, pupils practice thoughtfully transitioning their ideas sequentially. After the teacher models how to add these transitions using the Wheelwright draft created in a previous lesson,...

Young writers compose a gripping ending to their historical fiction narratives. Following the previous lesson plan, where learners wrote a bold beginning, class members examine exciting endings from a literary text. They then draft their...

Should the standard deviation be used for all distributions? Pupils know that the median is a better description of the center for skewed distributions; therefore, they will need a variability measure about the median for those...

The Pythagorean Theorem is a geometry pupil's best friend! Learners explain the equation a1b1 + a2b2 = 0 for perpendicular segments using the Pythagorean Theorem. They are able to identify perpendicular segments using their...