After studying utopian literature, students design their own utopian society, publishing the explanation of their ideal world on a blog. As they blog about their utopia, students establish the habits, practices, and organizing social structures that citizens will follow in their utopian societies. They begin by brainstorming ideas about what a perfect society would be like and then, in groups, begin to plan their project. Next, they become familiar with the blogging process, including legal guidelines and the specific site they will be using. Over several class sessions, students work on their blogs comparing their work to a rubric. Finally, after students visit one another's blogs and provide constructive and supportive feedback, they reflect on their own work. The lesson plan includes alternative handouts for classrooms where computer or blog access is limited. In this alternative, students complete the same basic activities, but publish their work using a Flip Book.

The lesson and activities teach students to recognize and explore bias and media stereotyping and be able to identify and analyze propaganda techniques in magazine and//or TV advertising.

In this module, students read, discuss, and analyze nonfiction and dramatic texts, focusing on how the authors convey and develop central ideas concerning imbalance, disorder, tragedy, mortality, and fate.

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

In this module, students engage with literature and nonfiction texts that develop central ideas of guilt, obsession, and madness, among others. Building on work with evidence-based analysis and debate in Module 1, students will produce evidence-based claims to analyze the development of central ideas and text structure. Students will develop and strengthen their writing by revising and editing, and refine their speaking and listening skills through discussion-based assessments.

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

In this lesson students build their knowledge base and learn to read and summarize informational texts. Students will be able to read and summarize informational text, identify key details from surprising details, and recognize the main ideas/concepts presented in articles. They will also be able to listen, take notes, and discuss the issues presented in informational texts with a small group.

Newsela is an innovative way to build reading comprehension with nonfiction. Daily news articles are grouped by topics such as Arts, Sports, War and Peace. Teachers search by topic, grade level, standards, and available quizzes, and they can also create a class and assign articles to read. Each article has five available lexiles to help differentiate for students. Students can practice targeted reading skills through typed written responses.

This lesson allows students to explore the different sides associated with the issue of slavery. It can be used for either cross-content lessons between English and Social Studies, as part of an argument unit in English, or as part of a larger unit in Social Studies. The learning objectives for the lesson are that students are able to identify those who are for and against slavery, understand how people used the U.S. Constitution to support their reasons for/against slavery, and the economic argument for or against slavery.

Reading, analyzing, and evaluating informational text is a challenge for students. Here are some strategies for helping students complete close reading.

Per the creator, rreading and learning memory strategies utilized by the some of the brightest minds of all time. The structure strategy was designed by Dr. Bonnie J.F.Meyer in the 1970s and has been tested extensively with exemplary results in reading comprehension.
This video introduces how text structure helps us remember what we learn, why our brain likes the strategy, and the text structures of problem/solution and cause/effect.  The video addresses that expert learners use these strategies and then refers to a few inventors that may have used these.

This unit offers formative assessment activities on gathering evidence, close reading, summarizing, themes, the author's craft and vocabulary in context for the novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Your students will apply their knowledge of letters and letter sounds as they play games and interact with letters online, using what they see and learn to create their own ABC book.