LAFS.1112.W.4.10Archived Standard

This website provides an easy to use free platform for teachers to engage students in online discussions regarding the content of the course. Tutorials and directions along with examples and suggestions are provided.

Type: Educational Software / Tool

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.

Type: Lesson Plan

Huck Finn's moral journey parallels Mark Twain's own questions about slavery. Like the photographers of the nineteenth-century, Twain, a Realist, struggled with how best to portray fictionalized characters, while still expressing truth and creating social commentary. In this lesson, students use a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast Mark Twain's novel and/or excerpts from Frederick Doulgass' narrative to original photographs of slaves from the late-nineteenth century. Then they write an essay to compare the different portrayals, arguing to what extent art can reliably reflect truth. In addition, they will discuss art as social commentary.

Type: Lesson Plan

After reading Act 1 of The Crucible in which 13 of the 21 characters are introduced, students create Trading Cards to describe and analyze an assigned character. Then they explore portraits of Puritans online to assist them in creating a portrait of the character and present a rationale to explain their work of art. A "Portrait Gallery" is set up around the classroom, so the students are able to refer to portraits during later acts and better understand the characters' motives and relationships.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson sequence, students will read and analyze the poem "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks. For the summative assessment, students will compose a fictional narrative from the perspective of a chosen character from the poem. The character will reveal how his/her days spent at the pool hall influenced who he/she is today.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students read, analyze, and discuss medieval English ballads and then list characteristics of the genre. They then emphasize the narrative characteristics of ballads by choosing a ballad to act out. Using the Venn diagram tool, students next compare medieval ballads with modern ones. After familiarizing themselves with ballad themes and forms, students write their own original ballads, which they perform in small groups. Finally, students engage in self-reflection on their group performances and on the literary characteristics of their ballads.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will read Emily Dickinson poems, complete text marking and annotations of the poems, and write a response that explains their analysis of how Emily Dickinson uses figurative language to create tone.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will identify and analyze how two authors use figurative language to support the themes of each of their poems. Students will complete text marking and annotations to show their analysis of each, and will write a response that explains their analysis of each.

Type: Lesson Plan

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.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this lesson, students are introduced to the definition and characteristics of a dystopian work by watching video clips from The Matrix and other dystopian films. They first explore the definition and characteristics of utopian and dystopian societies, and then compare and contrast the two using a Venn diagram online tool. Next, they identify the protagonist in clips from The Matrix and then discuss how the clips extend and confirm their understanding of a dystopia. Students then view additional film clips and identify which characteristics of a dystopian society the clip is intended to portray. Finally, they explore how they can apply their knowledge about dystopias to future readings.

Type: Teaching Idea

After gaining skills 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?".

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

In order to appreciate historical fiction, students need to understand factual context and recognize how popular culture reflects the values, mores, and events of a time period. Since a newspaper records significant events and attitudes representative of a period, students will create a literary newspaper (8 pages) depicting life of the "Roaring Twenties" utilizing primary source materials from the American Memory collections

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

JJonathan Swift's 1729 pamphlet "A Modest Proposal" is a model for satirizing social problems. In this 2 week unit, students complete multiple readings of Swift's essay: a guided reading with the teacher, a collaborative reading with a peer, and an independent reading. Through guided reading questions, students will examine satiric devices used by Swift, in addition to analyzing tone and how the various sections of the piece work togeher. Then, pairs of students will develop a mock television newscast or editorial script, like those found on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update," The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report, including appropriate visual images in PowerPoint. In their script, students will collaboratively identify a contemporary social problem, analyze it, and develop an outrageous satiric solution to resolve it.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence