In this activity, you and your students will explore Elizabethan stage practices as the rustic yet enthusiastic amateur actors from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. While it's not necessary to teach Shakespeare's biography while studying his plays, sometimes opportunities to explore his world through his own eyes present themselves in his text. Students' new insights into the text will provide them with a deeper appreciation for Shakespeare’s world. This activity will take one or two class periods.

A series of lessons that explain the short story as a genre and provide resources and stories to analyze.

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

Explain how specific events and lines of text in All American Boys reveal aspects of characters.

Explain how specific events and lines of text in All American Boys reveal aspects of Quinn’s character and his perspective.

Explain how events and lines of text reveal characters’ perspectives of themselves and others in All American Boys.

Identify and explain the ways that characters’ lives are shaped by race and racism in All American Boys.

Explain the impact of Rashad’s assault on characters and their perspectives in All American Boys.

Explain how events in All American Boys reveal and challenge characters’ racial biases.

Explain how racial bias shapes the way that characters in All American Boys—and people more generally—are viewed.

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

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.

This lesson invites students to reconfigure Meg’s journey into a board game where, as in the novel itself, Meg’s progress is either thwarted or advanced by aspects of her emotional responses to situations, her changing sense of self, and her physical and intellectual experiences.

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.