Students will read through chapter 12 of The Giver where they find that the people in The Giver got rid of the ability to see color. First students will look at a variety of colors and determine what emotions the colors make them feel. Then they will each write about a color without giving the name of the color; the students in the class will need to guess the color. After that assignment, students will analyze how colors affect behaviors and emotions and critically determine why the people in the that world decided to make everyone see in black and white. Students will end the lesson answering the question "Why do you think we have color in our world?"

In ths lesson seed, students will compare a poem and a text about Booker T. Washington.  Students will identify the central idea and supporting evidence in each text.

The object consists of a text in the public domain that has been downloaded from the web, uploaded into the web-based application Kami, and annotated by me with instructions and reflection questions for the students. Students whould read the story while adding their own annotations (such as observations or questions). They may also highlight or underline sections of text and respond to the comments of other students.

      The activity is meant to integrate a whole-class read-aloud and an independent active reading of the text, taking the best from both: students will be able to engage in a discussion with their classmates while reading reflecting, and annotating at their own pace.

Designed to introduce students to Shakespeare in a fun way by kinesthetic activities and interesting fun facts about his life.

The lessons in this unit provide you with an opportunity to use online resources to further enliven your students' encounter with Greek mythology, to deepen their understanding of what myths meant to the ancient Greeks, and to help them appreciate the meanings that Greek myths have for us today. In the lessons below, students will learn about Greek conceptions of the hero, the function of myths as explanatory accounts, the presence of mythological terms in contemporary culture, and the ways in which mythology has inspired later artists and poets.

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

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.

Students evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of different mediums and then compare and contrast the structure of the texts they have viewed/read to consider how the texts use different structures to convey similar ideas.

Comic strip summarizing the plot of the play plus a cloze procedure activity.

Students will be able to read a grade level text,  the novel "The Outsiders". As they read they will have to cite information, make inferences and connections, summarize, compare different mediums (book and movie) and learn about the author and how her experiences shaped the novel. Students will also get to write persuasively and creatively during this unit.

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun provides a compelling and honest look into one family's aspirations to move to another Chicago neighborhood and the thunderous crash of a reality that raises questions about for whom the "American Dream" is accessible.

Laminate these question sheets and use them as group discussion prompts during reading lessons. They vary in difficulty.

Studying Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," students explore the intricate relationship between a poem's form and its content.

Explain how specific events in All American Boys reveal and/or change characters’ perspectives.

Explain how Quinn makes the decision to attend the rally, and the impact of this decision in All American Boys.

Students used Padlet walls to post thoughts/connections/questions about their reading of the historical fiction novel My Brother Sam Is Dead. Students were placed into small groups by teacher. Teacher created a Padlet wall for each small group. Group members were asked to post at least two comments per chapter of reading.

In this lesson students will practice visualizing and understanding that visualization is an important comprehension strategy. Students will share their visualization of the story through original artwork.

Clues to Walt Whitman's effort to create a new and distinctly American form of verse may be found in his Notebooks, now available online from the American Memory Collection.  In an entry to be examined in this lesson, Whitman indicated that he wanted his poetry to explore important ideas of a universal scope (as in the European tradition), but in authentic American situations and settings using specific details with direct appeal to the senses.

FreeReading is an open source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. Because it is open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. FreeReading contains Writing Activities, a page of activities to address important writing skills and strategies.