Is there such a thing as fate/luck? Can one fight destiny? As part of their study of Chinua Achebe's purpose in writing Things Fall Apart, class members answer these questions from Achebe's point of view and then from William...

Yo-ho-ho, Treasure Island can be lots of fun with the aid of a resource that guides readers' exploration of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of buccaneers and buried gold. It's the glory of the read that will turn your...

The Oscar for the Best Adapted Screenplay acknowledges a writer's excellence in adapting material found in another source. What do your class members know about adapted resources? Find out with an assessment that asks readers to...

As an assessment of their skill in crafting a compare and contrast essay, class members read and compare the portrayals of nature in excerpts from naturalist John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra and from poet Emily Dickinson's...

A good prompt is hard to find, especially ones that encourage application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of a text. Help is here in the form of a prompt list for George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four that offers essay topics that...

The intricate craft of narrative writing can make a happy story feel exuberant or a sad story feel devastating. With 42 extensive lessons that include poignant discussion questions, standards-aligned self-reflections, engaging writing...

O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" is the classic example of irony in literature. Teach young writers about the ways irony can engage their readers with an activity in which they write scripts using dramatic irony, situational irony, and...

Life in the Florida swamps after the Civil War comes alive in the 1946 film adaptation of Majorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling. The film of this powerful coming-of-age story, filled with love and loss, can be used with or without a...

After watching part of a Club Write Kids video and discussing the editing process, each group of learners writes a letter to a favorite author. They ask for a copy of a page of manuscript that has gone through the editing process. Prior...

Help your class listen and respond to a fictional story by creating a story structure mobile illustrating the main characters, setting, plot, problem, story events, and solution. Using a coat hanger, they will create an artistic element...

Students use a scene from a book and make it come alive in movie clips.

Middle schoolers watch Charlie Chaplin films and discuss film elements. They select a story written by Edgar Allen Poe to write and produce a movie of. They film scenes, edit, and create a final iMovie project.

Primary readers investigate several comprehension skills in the ten lessons of this unit. Forming opinions about stories, comparing stories to each other, using Venn Diagrams, and applying the ideas from a story to real life situations...

Practice using the Turn the Question Around (TQA) method to answer reading comprehension questions based on short narrative paragraphs. Instructions and materials are included for direct, guided, and independent instruction. Responses...

After listening to the story, The Best Part of Me, learners will identify a positive physical feature of themselves, and create a descriptive poem about their favorite feature. Photographs are taken, and a nice final draft of the poem is...

Students analyze "To Build a Fire" by Jack London and "The Open boat" by Stephen Crane. They write an essay in which they compare and contrast the narrators and plots in each story.

Students examine their own history to expand how they examine the world. They research being a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. They also examine Muslim culture.

Third, fourth, and fifth graders read the book The Bracelet by Yushiko Uchida and examine the events of Uchida's life. They participate in a guided discussion of Japanese culture, perform a reader's...

Increased reading comprehension begins with decoding and automatically recognizing words, which is the focus of this instruction. Using their choice of six different Winnie the Pooh stories, partners practice a variety of strategies...

Learners create and publish a newspaper that reflects and explains pioneer and medieval societies. They become newspaper writers for a specific time period. They adopt a holistic approach to exploring community life in medieval and...

Learners read texts reflecting multiple cultural perspectives. 

While reading the book Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls, the class ties together the core reading objectives, which are making predictions, comprehending new information, reading for author's purpose, independence in reading,...

Engage in an activity that focuses on the concepts of formal and informal language use. Middle and high schoolers compare and contrast each style by using a Venn diagram that includes some examples. They read and hear a passage of lyrics...

Have your class explore the art of storytelling through this lesson on fairy tales and folktales. Learners interact with a variety of fairy tales and folktales. They practice telling stories out loud as well as writing their own. This...