Cluster 4: Range of WritingArchived

The decisions students make about social and political issues are often influenced by what they hear, see, and read in the news. For this reason, it is important for them to learn about the techniques used to convey political messages and attitudes. In this lesson, high school students learn to evaluate political cartoons for their meaning, message, and persuasiveness. Students will learn about the techniques cartoonists frequently use, and, for the summative project, will analyze one political cartoon, and design a presentation on how the cartoon signifies the time period, the techniques used, and the overall message that the cartoonist was trying to convey.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is the third in a series of three based on O. Henry's short story "The Gift of the Magi." The previous lessons provide instruction in using context clues to determine word meanings and in analyzing the significance of literary devices as they support the theme of Love and Sacrifice. In this final lesson, students will apply their knowledge of context clues from lesson one and their analysis of theme from lesson two as they consider the use of irony in the texts: "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Shivering Beggar," a poem by Robert Graves.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will read the poem "The War After the War" by Debora Greger and examine the three different perspectives within the poem. This lesson provides an opportunity for students to examine and analyze figurative language and perspective, as well as craft their own poem using multiple perspectives and figurative language.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is the third lesson in a three-part unit examining privacy, surveillance, and technology. In this lesson, students will create a digital presentation and present their information to the class discussing a current privacy concern related to technology.

Type: Lesson Plan

Dramatizing life stories provides students with an engaging way to become more critical readers and researchers. In this lesson, students select American authors to research, create timelines, and write bio-poems. Then, they collaborate with other students in small groups to design and perform a 'panel of authors' presentation in which they role-play as their authors. The final project requires each student to synthesize information about his or her author in an essay. There are tons of additional links and resources included in this lesson plan!

Type: Lesson Plan

There's more to plot than identifying the series of events in a story. After viewing a PowerPoint presentation on plot structure, students will read and analyze the plots of three different short stories (as a class, in small groups, and individually). Then, they will use an online interactive plot structure tool to diagram the plot lines. This lesson also includes a writing assessment with rubric.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson includes a close-reading and text-marking activity using two soldiers' letters, one from the Civil War and one from The War on Terror. Students will discover by looking at word choice and sentence structure how language styles have changed over time.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will explore poetic expression, both written and spoken, and evaluate its significance as a medium for social commentary. Students will also examine literary devices including metaphor, simile, symbolism, and point of view.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students learn about the usefulness of annotation in making diverse connections with a text that lead to deep analysis. They then make, revise, and publish annotations for a short piece of text.

Type: Lesson Plan

Protest songs serve as a means to combat social ills and cover a wide array of topics, including racism, sexism, poverty, imperialism, environmental degradation, war, and homophobia. This lesson makes a connection to popular culture by asking students to work in pairs to research and analyze contemporary and historic protest songs. After learning about wikis, each pair posts their analysis of the protest songs to a class wiki, adding graphics, photos, and hyperlinks as desired. The class then works together to organize the entries. Finally, students listen to all of the protest songs and add information and comments to each other's pages.

This lesson works well with a unit focusing on a piece of literature in which a character(s) actively fights for social, political, or economic justice. For example, this lesson can build on a discussion of the issues that Atticus Finch contends with in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Type: Lesson Plan

How would the story have changed if Romeo had received the letter? This lesson encourages students to pick a turning point in a tragedy and show how the action of the play would have been significantly altered had a different decision been made or a different action taken. Students use a graphic organizer to analyze the plot of the play. They identify a turning point in the play, alter the decision that the characters make, and predict the characters' actions throughout the rest of the play. Students create a plot outline of their altered play and present their new stories to the class. Teachers can test students' content knowledge and understanding of conflicts within the play while also challenging their creativity and their understanding of plot. This lesson focuses on Shakespearean tragedy, but it can be used with any tragedy that students have read or as a book report alternative.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will review the key terms: diction, denotation, and connotation. Working in groups, they will determine denotative and connotative meanings of various words and discuss how this choice of diction relates to the tone and author's attitude. The lesson culminates with a short creative writing activity in which students use connotative diction to convey a particular tone.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will read "My Watch: An Instructive Little Tale," by Mark Twain. Students will analyze how Twain’s use of figurative language creates style. Students will present their analysis in an oral presentation.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will review the format of a villanelle and analyze how it contributes to the defiant tone of the poem. At the conclusion of the lesson, students will write a short response to answer the question: “How does Dylan Thomas’s use of metaphor and imagery create a defiant tone and support the universal theme of death?”

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will analyze and interpret two pastoral poems, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe and "Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" by Sir Walter Raleigh, with an emphasis on the universal theme of love and its expression. The analysis will culminate with the students creating modern interpretations of the two poems. Hand-outs of the poems, questions to aid analysis, and a model modern interpretation are provided.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is the culminating lesson in a three-part series designed to support students as they embrace poetry analysis. The purpose of this lesson is for students to reflect on the poems they analyzed in lessons one and two. Students will then create a digital presentation to share with the class that explains their analysis of the use of symbols, imagery, mood, and theme in poetry.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is part one in a series of three lessons analyzing the language of Emily Dickinson, researching the Romantic Period, and comparing her works to her contemporaries. In part one of this lesson series, students will work in small groups to analyze the language of Emily Dickinson's poems, they will research the literary period of The Romantic Period, and they will create a re-envisioned poem using information gleaned from their small group discussions, research, and whole group discussions.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is the first lesson in a unit of three lessons focusing on spoken word poetry. In the first lesson, students will read, view, and analyze the figurative language in several poems in print and on video. Students will then write original poems based on their own lives, that includes poetic devices. Students will then present their original poems to the class using appropriate intonation, inflection, and fluency.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will summarize and analyze Petrarch's love sonnets (including "Sonnet 18", "Sonnet 159" and "Sonnet 104") and then do the same with Shakespeare's love sonnets (including "Sonnet 18", "Sonnet 130" and "Sonnet 106"), comparing Shakespeare's themes and approach to Petrarch's themes and approach. The summative assessment is an essay in which students will summarize and analyze Shakespeare's "Sonnet 27" and describe how that poem reflects and diverges from Petrarch's themes and style.

Type: Lesson Plan

Upon reading “The Masque of the Red Death,” students will analyze the universal theme of humans trying to escape death and will create a one-page visual summary of their analysis in this lesson.

Type: Lesson Plan

This MEA is designed to have teams of 4 students look at data in a two-way table. Teams must discuss which categorical or quantitative factors might be the driving force of a song's popularity. Hopefully, popular songs have some common thread running through them.

Each team must write down their thought process for creating the most popular playlist of songs for a local radio station. A major constraint for each team is explaining how they will maximize the 11 minutes available with the most popular songs.

Students will be provided with letters from a local radio station, WMMM - where you can receive your "Daily Mix of Music and Math." WMMM has 10 songs and the researchers have collected data on each. Student teams: it is your responsibility to pick the playlist and write a letter to the station supporting why you made your selection. The winning team gets an opportunity to record a sound bite to introduce their playlist on the radio.

Now, just when the teams believe they have addressed WMMM's request, a twist is thrown in the midst, and the student teams must return to the drawing board and write a second letter to the station which may or may not affect the team's original playlist.

Do you have the musical swag to connect the associations?

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. MEAs resemble engineering problems and encourage students to create solutions in the form of mathematical and scientific models. Students work in teams to apply their knowledge of science and mathematics to solve an open-ended problem while considering constraints and tradeoffs. Students integrate their ELA skills into MEAs as they are asked to clearly document their thought processes. MEAs follow a problem-based, student-centered approach to learning, where students are encouraged to grapple with the problem while the teacher acts as a facilitator. To learn more about MEAs visit: https://www.cpalms.org/cpalms/mea.aspx.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson (lesson one in a two-part unit), students will read Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s short story "Harrison Bergeron" examining the usage of literary elements in order to develop an objective summary describing how the author uses language to portray characterization, impact tone and mood, and develop the central ideas of the text. Students will be able to remark upon/critique the author's criticism of society through his combination of the above elements.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson provides secondary students with opportunities to analyze a character's motivation in an excerpt from a work of literary nonfiction.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will create story boards to show their analysis of plot, characters, and setting in Act One of Romeo and Juliet. Students will then use the information analyzed with the the reading of Act One and the story board creations to answer a short response question.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson (part 2 in a 2-part unit), students will review crucial details present/omitted in a film treatment (2081) of Vonneguts's "Harrison Bergeron," using a Venn diagram to record their observations. Students will use their diagram to compose a one to two page objective summary of their findings, drawing parallels between the original work and the film in regard to literary elements, author's purpose, audience, etc. and their effects on the overall meaning of the works.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will learn microscope basics including parts of a compound light microscope, different types of microscopes, and how microscopes work. This lesson includes a 4-day plan that has students label the parts of a microscope with the teacher, in a group, and using a microscope. The students will also complete a presentation on a specific type of microscope.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will briefly examine the history and myths that led to the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by reading and discussing the article, "Frankenstein, Meet Your Forefathers" (link provided within the lesson). Students will then choose a text to research the backstory for how that written work came to be. A list of detailed research questions is provided, as well as optional book titles for students to research. Students will present their findings through creating a poster that illustrates the interesting points from their research. A number of engaging extension ideas, interdisiciplinary connections, and questions for further discussion are provided.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will identify rhetorical terms and methods, examine the rhetorical devices of JFK's inaugural address, and analyze and evaluate the effects of the rhetorical devices on the delivered speech.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is the first of three interrelated lessons in a unit which use text and fine arts (photography and paintings) to convey the theme(s) of immigration, shared American ideals, and civic responsibilities in a democracy. The first lesson asks students to analyze "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus. Students' understanding of text and earlier waves of immigration will be fostered by viewing photographs of immigrants to Ellis Island.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will be practicing close reading and literary analysis skills, annotating, and writing an analysis of texts. During the class discussion, students will practice listening skills and use explicit examples from a text to support their analysis in this lesson. Suggested excerpts from Annie Dillard's From an American Childhood, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain are referenced in this lesson.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will read multiple texts, conduct online research, brainstorm ideas, and analyze and synthesize information. Students will also practice the arts of note-taking, writing concise and informative summaries, and collaborating with peers to learn more about South Africa's Anti-Apartheid (A.A.A.) movement and the hero who saved them.

Type: Lesson Plan

Learn how to create a Poem in 2 Voices in this interactive tutorial. This tutorial is Part Three of a three-part series. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a Poem in 2 Voices using evidence drawn from a literary text: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.

You should complete Part One and Part Two of this series before beginning Part Three.   

Click HERE to launch Part One. Click HERE to launch Part Two. 

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Understanding Julius Caesar Through Diaries allows students to read and understand Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by getting involved in an on-going project that promotes engagement throughout the play. Instead of simply reading the work, students become actively involved with plot and characterization. At the beginning of the unit, each student chooses a character that they want to be throughout the duration of the play. At the end of each act students complete diary entries for this character, so in addition to documenting the major action in the play, they also report it from the viewpoint of one specific character.

Type: Project

This teaching idea addresses the pros and cons of discussion by analyzing the concept of utopia in a satire. Students collaborate in small groups to create a Discussion Web that addresses the question, "Are people equal?" Students engage in meaningful discussions analyzing all sides of their initial response, form a consensus, and present it to the class. Students then read "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and use supporting details to complete another Discussion Web that examines whether or not the people in the story are equal. Web-based graphic organizers, assessments, and extension activities are included.

Type: Teaching Idea

How do places and experiences affect writers' lives and works? Is where a writer comes from relevant to reading their work? In this lesson, students consider the power of place in their own lives, research the life of a writer, and develop travel brochures and annotated maps representing the significance of geography in a writer's life.

Type: Teaching Idea

Students read a high-interest short story. A PowerPoint mini-lesson explains the difference between freewriting and summary writing helping students distinguish between the two. An additional PowerPoint mini-lesson on writing thesis statements for literary analysis is provided. Students progress from freewriting to generating thesis statements to writing an outline for a literary analysis essay.

Type: Teaching Idea

Students use an online chart to match the character traits of a character in a book they are reading with specific actions the character takes. Students then work in pairs to "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using Internet reference tools to compile lists of accurate, powerful adjectives supported with details from the reading. Students read each other's lists of adjectives and try to identify who is being described.

Type: Teaching Idea

Students are given a picture and asked individually to describe the picture in one sentence of less than twenty words. Afterward, the class analyzes syntax, imagery, and meaning in a chosen one-sentence poem by a canonical author to decide what makes it a poem. Students return to their own descriptive sentence to decide whether it is, is not, or could be a poem, justifying their reasoning. This exercise encourages students to dissect an established poem while defining the characteristics of the genre of poetry. Students then apply their knowledge during reflection upon their own work.

Type: Teaching Idea

Are today's young adult novels darker in theme than in years past? What's behind the current wave of dystopia in young adult literature? In this teaching idea, students reflect on some of the reasons dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories appeal to young readers by engaging in one of six different activities.

Type: Teaching Idea

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence