Name | Description |
Gr 9-12. Everglades Restoration, Lesson 2: Our Changing Watershed | Students will read a passage from Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: The River of Grass and compare the description with the present day Everglades. They will then look at the impacts from the US Army Corps of Engineers project and evaluate whether the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) addresses these issues. |
Gr 9-12. Everglades Restoration, Lesson 3: A Look at CERP | Students will analyze information about various current and ongoing CERP projects and report on the progress that is being made. |
Views on Death: A Look at Two Holy Sonnets by John Donne | In this lesson, students will read and analyze two poems by John Donne: "Holy Sonnet X" and "Holy Sonnet VI." Text-dependent questions, an answer key, and teacher's help notes are included. Students will write a brief comparison/contrast essay to examine how Death is portrayed across both poems. A rubric for the essay is included, along with a writing organizer to help writers draft a basic essay. |
A Need for Sleep: A Close Reading of a Soliloquy from King Henry IV, Part II | In this lesson, students will consider the literary elements Shakespeare uses to communicate King Henry's inability to sleep. Students will analyze how diction, tone, syntax, and imagery help to convey King Henry's state of mind, and will write a short response to outline their analysis, using text to support their answers. |
Advice to Youth - A Satire by Mark Twain | Students will read and analyze the satire in Mark Twain's, "Advice to Youth." Students will answer text-dependent questions and write a short analysis regarding how Twain uses satire to support his claim. |
Shakespearean Soliloquy Fluency: A Close Reading and Analysis of "To be or not to be" | In this lesson, students will perform multiple close readings of the well-known "To be or not to be" soliloquy from William Shakespeare's Tragedy of Hamlet. Students will then write two paragraphs to show their analysis of Shakespeare’s use of figurative language and its effect on the text. |
The Modernist Struggle: Allusions, Images, and Emotions in T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock | Students will research modernism, analyze allusions and images in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," diagnose the character's mental weakness using evidence from the poem, and write him an email about how to improve his state of mind from the perspective of a hypothetical online mental health professional. |
Budgeting: Finding Personal Financial Success | During this lesson, students will learn about budgets, checking and savings accounts, and interest. They will then have a research activity to focus on their future lives, which they will use to create a budget for their lives after they have finished their education and/or job training. This budget will be created using a spreadsheet or other technology to explore how various factors, such as interest rates, will affect their budget and necessary income. |
Universal Theme: The Cycle of Life | Through an analysis of E. E. Cummings' poem "anyone lived in a pretty how town,” an using the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," as supplemental resources, students will analyze the theme of the importance of the cycle of life and nature as it pertains to human existence. The three texts come from dramatically different genres, time periods, and settings capturing the essence of a universal theme. |
Free Willy? An Argument Analysis of the Controversy over Captive Killer Whale Populations | In this lesson, students will conduct several close readings of the article "SeaWorld, Activists Make Questionable Claims on Killer Whale Life Spans" by Jason Garcia. For the first close reading, students will focus on selected academic vocabulary. In the second reading, students will analyze the claims made in the article, focusing, in particular, on the validity of each claim made. During the final close reading, students will analyze the argument presented in the article, choose a side, and participate in a Philosophical Chairs discussion. |
Playlist for Holden: Character Analysis With Music and Lyrics | This mini-lesson invites students to think of a literary character as a peer, creating an authentic connection between literature and life. While the lesson uses The Catcher in the Rye as an example, the activities could be centered on the primary character of any novel. Students choose a perspective on the character (from options suggested by the teacher) and work in small groups to identify scenes in the novel that reflect their view. They then select songs appropriate for the character and write a rationale for each song chosen, including supporting evidence from the text. When students present their completed playlists in class, their classmates inevitably make observations that increase everyone's insights into the character and the novel. |
"The American Puritan Tradition: Part III" | This lesson is part three of a three-part unit that will explore and analyze how different authors convey American Puritanism. In this lesson, students plan to write and then complete an essay to explore how two different authors and texts portray American Puritanism, Jonathan Edwards in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and Arthur Miller in “The Crucible.” |
The American Puritan Tradition: Part 1 | This lesson is part one of three in a unit that will explore and analyze how American Puritanism has been represented in different texts. The goal of this lesson is for students to analyze the central idea and how the authors' style (figurative language, persuasive techniques) contributes to establishing and achieving the purpose in "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." |
Poetry Analysis and Time Periods | Students will analyze how Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson each used figurative language to develop a specific tone in relation to mortality. They will also consider how each poet reflected the time periods within which they wrote. |
Dealing with Grief: A Comparison of Tone and Theme | In this four-part lesson series, students will delve into the topic of grief through analysis of poetic devices, form, and point of view in poems by Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Students will connect theme to the poets’ viewpoints on the emotions, or the lack thereof, that one experiences during times of pain and loss. Students will read the poems multiple times to seek layers of meaning and write an in-depth analysis. |
Demonstrating Understanding of Richard Wright's Rite of Passage | After reading Richard Wright's short novel Rite of Passage, students will demonstrate their understanding of plot, character, and conflict by writing recommendations for the protagonists' future to a juvenile court system judge. |
Name | Description |
Drawing Evidence for Analysis and Reflection | Learn to draw appropriate text evidence to support your written response to analysis and reflection prompts. In this interactive tutorial, you'll be working with excerpts from two of George Orwell’s works: 1984 and “Shooting an Elephant.” You'll practice identifying important evidence in the text to support your own thoughts and ideas. |
Name | Description |
Edcite: ELA Reading Grade 11 | Students can practice answering reading comprehension questions with engaging texts on the history of women's athletics. With an account, students can save their work and send it to their teacher when complete. |
Name | Description |
Facilitating a Socratic Seminar with the play "The Piano Lesson" by August Wilson | This teaching idea guides students in generating questions for a student led seminar based on their reading of August Wilson's play, "The Piano Lesson". Students will then use their questions to conduct a Socratic Seminar about the play. |
Name | Description |
Analyzing a Famous Speech | After gaining skill through analyzing a historic and contemporary speech as a class, students will select a famous speech from a list compiled from several resources and write an essay that identifies and explains the rhetorical strategies that the author deliberately chose while crafting the text to make an effective argument. Their analysis will consider questions such as: What makes the speech an argument?, How did the author's rhetoric evoke a response from the audience?, and Why are the words still venerated today? |
Name | Description |
Drawing Evidence for Analysis and Reflection: | Learn to draw appropriate text evidence to support your written response to analysis and reflection prompts. In this interactive tutorial, you'll be working with excerpts from two of George Orwell’s works: 1984 and “Shooting an Elephant.” You'll practice identifying important evidence in the text to support your own thoughts and ideas. |
Name | Description |
Edcite: ELA Reading Grade 11: | Students can practice answering reading comprehension questions with engaging texts on the history of women's athletics. With an account, students can save their work and send it to their teacher when complete. |