LAFS.910.W.4.10Archived Standard

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 artistic techniques cartoonists frequently use, and, for the summative project, will create their own political cartoon, analyze it, and give a presentation on their illustration.

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 in a short story. In this final lesson, students will apply their knowledge of context clues from lesson one while also working to analyze irony across two 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 speaker 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. Graphic organizers, answer keys, and a poem writing rubric have been included with the lesson. 

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will read, paraphrase, and summarize an article that explores the benefits as well as the pitfalls of the unblinking, all-seeing basilisk gaze of extraordinary 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 Afghanistan War. Students will discover by looking as word choice and sentence structure how language styles have changed over time. After the reading lesson, students will write two RAFTs in the style of the times to show their understanding.

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 author's meaning and tone. 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 conduct a close reading of a short story, "My Watch: An Instructive Little Tale," by Mark Twain. For the first reading, students will focus on story elements and selected academic vocabulary. In the second reading, students will analyze the structure of the text and the effects that are created by that structure. In the final reading, students will analyze figurative language used in the story and how it impacts meaning and tone. Graphic organizers to help students for the second and third reading are provided, along with completed organizers for teachers to use as possible answer keys. The summative assessment, in the form of an extended response paragraph, will require students to determine the central idea of the text and how it is shaped throughout the story. 

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson supports the implementation of the academic standards in the 9-10 classroom. It includes the literary text as well as templates for organization and links to pertinent materials. The purpose of this lesson is for students to read, understand, and analyze poetry through the use of close reading and scaffolded learning tasks. Students will learn the format of a villanelle and analyze how that format contributes to the tone of the poem. At the conclusion of the unit, students will write an essay that prompts students to use textual evidence to support their claim.

Type: Lesson Plan

The goal of this lesson is that students will be able to 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 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 lesson three of a three-part unit. The purpose of this lesson is to help students take the information they have gleaned in the previous two lessons from analyzing poems from the Brave New Voices series and use it to create an analytical and argumentative paragraph exploring how a theme is developed. This lesson guides students through creating an analytical paragraph and developing revision skills. By the end of this lesson students will explain, using specific textual evidence, how the theme is conveyed through the title, symbols, imagery, or tone.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson (part one of three in a unit), students will work in small groups to analyze the language of Emily Dickinson's poem, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant". Student interests will generate research on Emily Dickinson's poetry, her time, and audiences to better understand the recursive nature of writing that authors practice. While individually developing language skills, students will practice a close reading of the poem "The Soul Selects her own Society" and create a re-envisioned poem using language resources and vocabulary development exercises. Class discussions will center on evaluating the effectiveness of the Dickinson poems studied. The culminating activity will include a response paper that examines the recursive nature of writing as experienced through the small group, research, individual exercises, and class discussion.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is the first lesson in a unit of three lessons focusing on spoken word poetry, as presented on the Brave New Voices Web site. In this lesson, students will read, view, and analyze several poems in print and on video; use poetic devices identified in the read and viewed texts; write original poems based on their own lives; and present their original poems to the class using appropriate intonation, inflection, and fluency. At the end of the unit of study, students will write an analytical paragraph evaluating Brave New Voices poems.

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

"Our Role in a Small World" encompasses students' use of media presentations to enhance understanding of the realities most people face in our world as well as allowing students to convey complex ideas that link economic downfalls to Sold (820L).

Type: Lesson Plan

Upon reading, viewing, and discussing the characteristics of three diseases (including the fictional "Red Death" penned in Poe's allegorical tale, "The Masque of the Red Death"), students will complete a "3-Circle Venn Diagram" to help synthesize (first compare and contrast) the discussed elements. Students will use their Venn diagrams to help create a one-page summary of their comparisons of the diseases presented in the text/clips. Student summaries should be narrowed to discuss the defining characteristics of each disease (the fictional Red Death, the bubonic plague, and the Avian Bird Flu), as well as identify/evaluate similar patterns regarding the spread/evolution of each. Using their understanding of the material, students should assess whether plagues will continue to plague the human race while referring to the theme of Poe's work in their summary.

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 on how they will create the most popular playlist of songs for a local radio station. A major constraint for each team is to thoroughly explain 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 particular selection. The winning team gets an opportunity to record a sound bite which introduces 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. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

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

The text of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" is not only challenging, but presents students with opportunities to explore a wide variety of timeless themes. As students typically struggle with the language of Shakespeare, it is important that we pause from time to time and allow students to process the new knowledge. The story boards are a great way to assess students' understanding of the plot, characters, and setting before the final test.

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

After reading the novel All Quiet On The Western Front, students compose poems to convey the strong emotions that war conjures in people. Prewriting aides are provided to help students generate ideas in order to write the poem. Suggestions for areas to focus on during the revision process are given. Students then polish their poems with the goal of producing a powerful effect on readers.

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 both literary and informational 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 use meta-cognitive skills, 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. In addition, students will be encouraged to use their curiosity to dig for information related to 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

This teaching idea from The Learning Network of The New York Times asks students to examine the power of memorable sentences. Students are asked to gather and share interesting sentences and unforgettable quotes, including things they have read, things they have heard, or even one-liners from movies. Class discussion is directed toward a research study that demonstrates the brain's response to narrative and descriptive writing. Students are given the opportunity to paraphrase strong sentences by professional writers, write various iterations of the same sentence, and use the sentence as inspiration for writing an original short story.

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

Many students do not appreciate the importance of memorizing and reciting poems. This teaching idea will help them appreciate the value and relevancy of poetry by encouraging them to imagine situations where a scrap or two of memorized poetry can relate to every-day real-life situations. It would be an engaging opening activity for a poetry unit.

Type: Teaching Idea

Students pretend that they have just landed a job with a local music magazine, and their first assignment is to write a short article in which they interpret the lyrics of a popular song.

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

Students use several USA Today editorials to help them understand the national concern about whether students' writing skills are being sacrificed to meet the criteria for standardized tests. After reading the articles, students then evaluate the major points of the articles, brainstorm ideas for a position paper, and then write their opinion on the topic.

Type: Teaching Idea

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence