Do our childhood circumstances significantly shape us? As the close reading of “The Palace Thief” continues, groups examine how the results of the first "Mr. Julius Caesar" competition influenced the development of the characters in...

Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3, lines 139-170, is the focus of this day's lesson plan. Readers examine the dramatic irony in Juliet's comments and consider how "lamentable chance" caused by a "greater power" plays a role in the tragedy.

Compelling discussions are the result of open-ended, challenging questions. An introduction to Paideia discussions includes explicit directions about how to prepare readers and how to model the kinds of questions they should develop...

Throw down with a fun language arts game! Armed with a hand of writing-themed cards, learners craft arguments based on the strategies written on the cards, dropping cards as they discuss their claims further until there are no strategies...

How do Supreme Court justices interpret amendments to the Constitution? The resource helps answer that question by discussing how people use explicit and implicit language to interpret the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Learners...

Des'ree's song "You Gotta Be" is used to model for language learners the forms that can be used to express necessity (must, have to, have got to). After examining the grammar in the song, the attention switches to a discussion of the...

A reading of “Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers,” a New York Times article by Sara Rimer, triggers a discussion of the American Dream and what it means to strive for something. Following the discussion, class members...

What's the difference between the present perfect and simple past? Have your class practice identifying and using both of these verb tenses through pair activities, whole-class discussion, and a worksheet.

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.

Writers use class time to develop the draft of their personal narratives, drawing on techniques Haley uses in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Connect with the text using helpful annotation strategies. As your class reads the first section of Karen Russell's short story, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," they note important passages that establish character...

Class members discover what it means to publish their works. Working on a computer, young writers use an online dictionary to edit their spellings and conventions based on the information added to the rubric. From here, and most of the...

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...

Track character development with an excerpt from Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. As tenth graders examine the relationship between Jing-Mei and her mother, they compare both characters' expectations of each other in the chapter "Two Kinds."

Class members continue their analysis of Letters to a Young Poet, paying particular attention to how Rilke uses metaphor to develop his ideas about the source of inspiration.

Readers of "The Palace Thief" focus on how the author's descriptions and word choices reveal the characters of the narrator, Sedgewick, and the senator.

As the class concludes its close reading of “The Palace Thief,” groups consider how the narrator's character has changed throughout Ethan Canin’s short story.

Is history "little more than a relic," as one of the characters in "The Palace Thief" contends? Has Hundert's love of antiquity kept him from changing with the times? Readers consider how the author uses these conflicting views to...

Is man's character his fate? Can actions change character? To track the development of the central ideas in Ethan Canin’s short story “The Palace Thief,” groups compare Hundert's actions in the original "Mr. Julius Caesar" competition...

Did Bernie Madoff fit the profile of a Ponzi schemer because, as Diana Henrique contends in an excerpt from her The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death, he “did not fit the profile of a Ponzi schemer”? Huh? Groups begin their...

Who is to blame for Bernie Madoff's crime? Class members look for evidence Diana B. Henriques uses in The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust to support her claims that we share the responsibility with Madoff.

What exactly is consciousness? Readers look at paragraph three of the chapter "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" and discuss how Du Bois introduces the ideas of double consciousness and true self-consciousness. Scholars track the development...

Class members examine the images Arson and Budhos use to depict the working conditions on the sugar plantations and consider how these images support the arguments the writers present in Sugar Changed the World.

Use a West African folktale to practice several different skills in your first grade classroom. Learners read The Clever Monkey Rides Again and focus on rhyming words, reading comprehension, measurement, art, movement, and word...