John Muir is known as the father of our National Parks. His boyhood was spent in Marquette County, Wisconsin where he found inspiration in the wilderness around him. In this Unit, students will learn about John Muir’s boyhood neighborhood and actively work to preserve it, connect with Muir’s many accomplishments, understand different environmental philosophies, and saunter in nature while observing and reflecting on the world around them. Students will Connect, Explore, and Engage through intentional time in nature, reflective writing, reading inspirational passages by Muir, and using technology to document changes over time.

In this intriguing article for American Theater magazine, author Rob Weinert-Kendt interviews American actor Bill Pullman and Norwegian director Stein Winge as they launch a completely revisioned version of Shakespeare's  for a Norwegian audience.

In this 12th grade Extension Module, students can go deeper into analyzing arguments, as they outline, analyze, and evaluate the claims that Michelle Alexander makes in|The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, paying attention to her use of rhetoric to convey her ideas. Please note that this 12th grade Extension Module is an extra module that has been developed as part of the 12th grade ELA modules; grades 9-11 do not have additional or extension modules. A full year of curriculum is available for 12th grade through modules 1-4.

Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .

This is a guided packet used with my Yearbook Publication class.  It was designed to specifically meet standard RI.11-12.8, which is asking for students to read, understand, and evaluate legal reasoning used in US Supreme Court cases.  The cases students are required to look at in this packet are cases specifically related to student journalism and student press rights ( and ).  It is used as a guided Internet search to supplement the information presented in the journalism textbook.

Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom.

The Native American Veterans Tribute is a slideshow project in Native American Literature class that corresponds with the Veterans Day Assembly at our high school. Veterans who are invited to the assembly are served breakfast and watch the slideshow in the Commons. Our class slideshow is incorporated into the presentation that day. It allows students to recognize relatives or or other Native military veterans and pay tribute to them.

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck “created a literary portrait that defined an era. His account of the ‘Okie Exodus' in The Grapes of Wrath became the principal story through which America defined the experience of the Great Depression.”
However, according to this New Criterion article by Keith Windschuttle,  Ã¢â‚¬Å“there is now an accumulation of sufficient historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s to show that almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief.”