Meet savvy scientist and inventor Hedy Lamarr, also known for her career as a glamorous international movie star. Dubbed "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World," Hedy actually preferred spending time creating inventions in her workshop to strutting down the red carpet. Hedy co-invented the technology known as frequency hopping, which turned out to be one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century! Today's cell phone, computers, and other electronic devices would be more vulnerable to hacking without the groundbreaking system discovered by a world-famous actress and gifted inventor. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Create small groups. Pass out one of the challenges listed in the lesson plan/book card to each group for them to come up with an invention that will solve the problem at hand.

Frances Gabe detested housework, so she invented a contraption to free herself from this tedious task forever: a self-cleaning house! Gabe's wacky, wonderful home included almost 70 new patented inventions, from a soap-spraying sprinkler in the ceiling to a kitchen cabinet that washed, dried, and stored dishes all in one place. Though Gabe's invention didn't catch on, her determination and clever thinking remind us that we don't have to accept the world as it is; we can improve it using our minds and our own two hands. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Frances Gabe created over 70 inventions because she hated cleaning. What is one thing you hate doing for chores? Develop an invention to have it clean itself.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

Amy Guglielmo, Jacqueline Tourville, and Giselle Potter tell the story of autism advocate Dr. Temple Grandin’s childhood and her quest to experience the sensation of a hug. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Students will work to develop an assistive technology solution for people with autism. Alternatively, students may develop assistive technology solutions for students with differing abilities. Students are encouraged to work with peers in a local special education classroom to combine their love of technology and engineering to help positively influence their peers’ lives.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

This pathway outlines blended steps that lead students through analysis of words, sounds and visuals around Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" song and video.  The concept of empathy will be introduced and will carry thematically throughout the entire unit.  Students will learn abou tthe literary terms: 

Theme, symbolism, imagery, repetition, annotation, connotation, denotation

This course investigates the uses and boundaries of fiction in a range of novels and narrative styles--traditional and innovative, western and nonwestern--and raises questions about the pleasures and meanings of verbal texts in different cultures, times, and forms. Toward the end of the term, we will be particularly concerned with the relationship between art and war in a diverse selection of works.

Meg set out to climb up and investigate the rain forest tree canopies — and to be the first scientist to do so. But she encountered challenge after challenge. Male teachers would not let her into their classrooms, the high canopy was difficult to get to, and worst of all, people were logging and clearing the forests. Meg never gave up or gave in. She studied, invented, and persevered, not only creating a future for herself as a scientist, but making sure that the rainforests had a future as well. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Your community has many different areas to explore - it might be a park, a grocery store, a forest, or an alley. For some people, it might be difficult to explore these areas because they may have differing abilities. Select one area in your community, and come up with a plan to build a way for it to be more accessible to everyone.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

Reading Emily Dickinson's letters alongside her poems helps students to better appreciate a remarkable voice in American literature, grasp how Dickinson perceived herself and her poetry, and perhaps most relevant to their own endeavors consider the ways in which a writer constructs a "supposed person."

Uncover the sources of Twain's comic genius in American traditions of dialect humor and literary satire.

This lesson allow students to explore the forces that prompted the literary modernism movement, specifically focusing on modernist poetry. By allowing students to explore the movement independently, they will also be able to develop research and inquiry skills.

In this triumph of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles a century of the remarkable Buendía family's history in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. The three lessons presented here explore the fantastic elements of this imaginary world, the real history that lies behind them, and García Márquez's own philosophical musings on writing about Latin America.

This lesson prompts students to think about a poem's speaker within the larger context of modernist poetry. First, students will review the role of the speaker in two poems of the Romanticism period before focusing on the differences in Wallace Stevens' modernist"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

In this lesson, students will explore the role of the individual in the modern world by closely reading and analyzing T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Students examine the novel's societal setting, which is also fraught with division. Crime and Punishment is more than just a demonstration of the idea that crime does not pay, it is a vivid depiction of societal injustice. For example, Dostoyevsky's mid-nineteenth century Russia offered women narrowly circumscribed roles, most often resulting in their dependence on men and/or a life of poverty. The negative effects of several other societal divisions raise additional questions.

Long perceived as a recluse who wrote purely in isolation, Emily Dickinson in reality maintained many dynamic correspondences throughout her lifetime and specifically sought out dialogues on her poetry. These correspondences"”both professional and private"”reveal a poet keenly aware of the interdependent relationship between poet and reader.

Richard grew up in Kenya as a Maasai boy, herding his family’s cattle, which represented their wealth and livelihood. Richard’s challenge was to protect their cattle from the lions who prowled the night just outside the barrier of acacia branches that surrounded the farm’s boma, or stockade. Though not well-educated, 12-year-old Richard loved tinkering with electronics. Using salvaged components, spending $10, he surrounded the boma with blinking lights, and the system works; it keeps lions away. His invention, Lion Lights, is now used in Africa, Asia, and South America to protect farm animals from predators. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Your challenge is to use broken or old technology and other available resources to create a prototype that can be used to protect your home. This could involve tinkering, hacking, or redesigning the components of the technology to meet your needs.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

Introduces practice and theory of literary criticism. Seminar focuses on topics such as the history of critical methods and techniques, and the continuity of certain subjects in literary history. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic: Theory and Use of Figurative Language. This seminar offers a course of readings in lyric poetry. It aims to enhance the student's capacity to understand the nature of poetic language and the enjoyment of poetic texts by treating poems as messages to be deciphered. The seminar will briefly touch upon the history of theories of figurative language since Aristotle and it will attend to the development of those theories during the last thirty years, noting the manner in which they tended to consider figures of speech distinct from normative or literal expression, and it will devote particular attention to the rise of theories that quarrel with this distinction. The seminar also aims to communicate a rough sense of the history of English-speaking poetry since the early modern period. Some attention will be paid as well to the use of metaphor in science.

Introduces practice and theory of literary criticism. Seminar focuses on topics such as the history of critical methods and techniques, and the continuity of certain subjects in literary history. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic: Theory and Use of Figurative Language. How does one writer use another writer's work? Does it matter if one author has been dead 300 years? What difference does it make if she's a groundbreaking twentieth-century feminist and the writer she values has come to epitomize the English literary tradition? How can a novelist borrow from plays and poems? By reading Virginia Woolf's major novels and essays in juxtaposition with some of the Shakespeare plays that (depending on one's interpretation) haunt, enrich, and/or shape her writing, we will try to answer these questions and raise others. Readings in literary criticism, women's studies, and other literary texts will complement our focus on the relationship--across time, media, and gender--between Shakespeare and Woolf. As a seminar, we will work to become more astute readers of literature within its historical, artistic, and political contexts, and consider how literature both reflects and contributes to these societal frameworks. Central texts will include Shakespeare's Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts. This subject is an advanced seminar in both the Literature and the Women's Studies Program.

The true story of how Momofuko Ando was inspired to create one of the world’s most popular foods after seeing long lines of hungry people waiting for a simple bowl of ramen following World War II. He dreamed about making a new kind of ramen noodle soup that was quick, convenient, and tasty for the hungry people because he believed that peace follows from a hungry stomach. With persistence, creativity, and a little inspiration, Ando succeeded. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Develop a food product (a new food, tool, or invention, et al) to help increase access to food in your community.

This seminar provides intensive study of exciting texts by four influential American authors. In studying paired works, we can enrich our sense of each author's distinctive methods, get a deeper sense of the development of their careers, and shake up our preconceptions about what makes an author or a work "great." Students will get an opportunity to research an author in depth, as well as making broader comparisons across the syllabus.

Close study of a limited group of writers. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic for Fall: Willa Cather. Topic for Spring: Oscar Wilde and the 90s. From Course Home Page: This seminar provides intensive study of texts by two American authors (Herman Melville, 1819-1891, and Toni Morrison, 1931-) who, using lyrical, radically innovative prose, explore in different ways epic notions of American identity. Focusing on Melville's Typee (1846), Moby-Dick (1851), and The Confidence-Man (1857) and Morrison's Sula (1973), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), the class will address their common concerns with issues of gender, race, language, and nationhood. Be prepared to read deeply (i.e. a small number of texts with considerable care), to draw on a variety of sources in different media, and to employ them in creative research, writing, and multimedia projects.