In this lesson, students are taught to use the Haiku format as a way to solidify the theme of their paper.  First students learn about the traditional Haiku structure, and then use the structure to reflect on the cohesiveness of the main ideas in a paper they have written.

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.

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 .

Students further develop close reading skills as they
examine Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The
tragedy of Hamlet develops many
central ideas, including revenge, mortality, madness, and the tension between
action and inaction. Students analyze the play through the close study of
Hamlet’s soliloquies and other key scenes to determine how Shakespeare’s
language and choices about how to structure the play impact character
development and central ideas. The showing of a filmed version of the play in
select lessons supplements students’ understanding of plot and background
points and encourages them to consider actors’ interpretations of the text.

This lesson invites students to use their understanding of modern experiences with digital technologies to make active meaning of an older text, such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, by asking students to create their own modern interpretation of specific events from the drama. Students first brainstorm a list of technologies they use, and then imagine what would happen if Romeo and Juliet were set in a modern-day world and that technology was available to the characters. Students work in small groups to create technology profiles for characters in the play, and then discuss their ideas with the class. Next, students select from a variety of projects in which they re-imagine a scene from the play with modern technology incorporated. Finally, students share their projects with the class and discuss why they made the choices of scene and technology that they did.

This resource contains a link to a visually pleasant Prezi and several notesheets that reflect scaffolded learning from asking the students to choose the most important information themselves to guiding the students to specific types of topic sentences only.

After reading The Odyssey and discussing the hero journey, students will move into this career research unit. First, students will choose a career that they are interested in exploring and researching. They will create a project/presentation to share the information about their career with their classmates. Then, they will choose a "hero" who made great strides in their chosen career as an inventor, business person, manufacturer, personality, etc. Students will review using MLA style in-text citations and works cited, paraphrasing and summarizing, and writing research as they write a research paper about their career hero.