This activity offers resources to guide students through lessons on determining whether sites are hoaxes or real, a skill necessary in everyday life.  Students analyze and evaluate using a guided worksheet whether a website passes the criteria.  In the lesson, there are plenty of examples to use as models or a guided reading lesson.  Links and activity are engaging for students.

Dr. Seuss's "The Cat in the Hat" is used as a primer to teach students how to analyze a literary work using plot, theme, characterization, and psychoanalytical criticism.

Using Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, students learn a simplified method of analyzing a literary work through psychoanalytical criticism. Students identify plot and theme, and then identify characters from the story with their psychological personalities (Id, Ego, and Superego). Students then develop an argument supporting the character identification. Finally, using explicit textual evidence, students write an analytical essay supporting their position.

Venn diagrams can be used effectively in kindergarten.  Making them user-friendly, hands-on, and developmentally appropriate as a tool and kindergarten students can use venn diagrams with ease. Students are guided toward an understanding of the Venn diagram by physically sorting items into hula hoops. Students are able to move to an interactive 
 As they sort objects into unions and sets in this lesson plan, students make their thinking visible through similar "rough-draft" talk. By thinking aloud about their choices in this lesson, students are invited to be storytellers as they explore the connections between mathematics and language.
Students can complete a self-assessment to determine their learning and working collaboratively in a group.

This lesson provides an introduction to the language and poetics of the epic poem Beowulf. Although this lesson assumes students will read Beowulf in translation, it introduces students to the poem’s original Old English and explains the relationship between Old, Middle, and Modern English. Students are introduced to the five characters in the Old English alphabet that are no longer used in Modern English. As a class, they translate a short, simple phrase from Old English, and then listen to a passage from the poem being read in Old English. Next, students are introduced to some poetic devices important to Beowulf. They learn about alliteration by reading an excerpt from W. H. Auden’s modern English poem “The Age of Anxiety,” then listen for alliteration in the Old English version of a passage from Beowulf. Finally, students explore the poetic functions of kennings, compounds, and formulas in Beowulf.

Through the use of nonfiction, students are encouraged and challenged to learn more about favorite animals and to document their findings with graphic organizers. Students begin their inquiry by comparing fiction and nonfiction books about animals, using a Venn diagram. They list things they want to know about animals on a chart. As a class, students vote on an animal to research. They revise their question list, and then research the animal using prompts from an online graphic organizer. After several sessions of research, students revisit their original questions and evaluate the information they have gathered. Finally, students revise and edit their work and prepare to present their findings to an authentic audience.

Students will be singing the blues in this lesson in which they identify themes from "The Gift of the Magi" and write and present blues poetry based on those themes.

During writing workshop, students research, write, revise, and share their own comprehensive biographies of African American jazz musicians.

Students work in small groups to examine Margaret AtwoodŐs use of and observations about language in The HandmaidŐs Tale. Through this activity, students discover and articulate overarching thematic trends in the book and then can extend their observations about official or political language to examples from their own world.

In this lesson, students use blogs to hold discussions about the effect of the factors of culture, history, and environment on Latino poetry.

Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.

After reading a work of literature as a class, students will brainstorm "crimes" committed by characters from that text. Groups of students will work together to act as the prosecution or defense for the selected characters, while also acting as the jury for other groups. Students will use several sources to research for their case, including the novel and internet resources. All the while, students will be writing a persuasive piece to complement their trial work.

While this lesson uses Shakespeare's The Tempest, there are several other text options. Handouts (except for the model case handout) are generic so that they can be used with any text.

Students explore the theme of love of war through texts on camaraderie among soldiers. They then compose a visual collage depicting their beliefs about the relationship between love and war.

Students prepare an already published scholarly article for presentation, with an emphasis on identification of the author's thesis and argument structure.

Students will whistle while they work on this lesson, creating a photomontage movie of their interpretation of a favorite song's lyrics that will end everyone's day on a high note.

By exploring myths and truths surrounding Abraham LincolnŐs Gettysburg Address, students think critically about commonly believed stories regarding this famous speech from the Civil War era.

Students name unnamed chapters in a novel they are reading. They discuss possible chapter names, considering accuracy, word choice, and connotation, before settling on a choice.

Using Beloved as a model of a work with multiple narrative perspectives, students use a visualizing activity and close reading to consider ways in which subjective values shape contradictory representations.

Students are introduced to the literary device of onomatopoeia and explore how the technique adds to a writer’s message. Students brainstorm a list of onomatopoeic words and then find examples of the technique in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Bells.†Once they find examples, students reflect on how the onomatopoeic words add to the poem and the writer’s message. They then apply their knowledge of the technique by choosing sound words in response to sounds they hear in an online tool. Following the lesson, students can look for additional examples of the literary device in their reading or look for places to add onomatopoeia to their writing.

Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).