The resource is a full interview (approximately 17 minutes) with the author of Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.  She discusses civil rights violations regarding the internment of Japanese Americans in camps in the western U.S. during WWII.
Students watch this author interview to supplement knowledge learned during the reading of the author's book.  They will glean additional information about the time period, the history, the events, as well as the feelings of the author during the events of the book and after writing the book as she is now in the interview.

In this lesson, The Jolly Postman is used as an authentic example to discuss letter writing as a genre. Students explore the letters to the storybook characters delivered by The Jolly Postman. They then learn how to categorize their own examples of mail. The Jolly Postman uses well-known storybook characters, from fairy tales and nursery rhymes, as recipients of letters. This children's storybook is therefore ideal for using as a review of these genres of literature and as a means of helping children begin to explore rhyme and a variety of writing styles. Several pieces of literature appropriate for use with this lesson are suggested.

Developed by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, this resource guide would be useful both in a single lesson for Lincoln's Birthday or for an extended look at Lincoln's Presidency and the challenges presented by the Civil War. The guide includes 3 middle school lessons including: "Understanding the Gettysburg Address", "The Language of the Gettysburg Address", and "A Civil Conversation". It allows for opportunities to include as part of the ELA curriculum as well.

What is scary, and why does it fascinate us? How do writers and storytellers scare us? This lesson plan invites students to answer these questions by exploring their own scary stories and scary short stories and books. The lesson culminates in a Fright Fair, where students share scary projects that they have created, including posters, multimedia projects, and creative writing.

In this lesson students will use information from articles about microorganisms and their prior knowledge to identify both the positive and negative aspects of microorganisms.

This lesson is the third and final part of the History's Mysteries unit, "What Makes a Good Leader?" In this lesson, students explore that leaders often make complex decisions and don’t always display positive leadership traits. While learning about George Washington’s use of slave labor throughout his life, students realize that even leaders are rarely perfect and can make poor decisions. This difficult topic is displayed in through the use of images and pictures and discussed in vocabulary appropriate for young learners.
This lesson is part of a unit containing the following lessons:
Grade 1: Unit 2 History Mystery 1: WHAT MAKES SOMEONE A GOOD LEADER?
Grade 1: Unit 2 History Mystery 2: WHAT MADE PEOPLE THINK GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD BE A GOOD LEADER?

This lesson is used for discussion of a novel read by the whole class. Working individually and in groups, using symbols, drawings, shapes, and colors, alongside words and quotations, students construct a graphic of their section of the novel using an online tool and then on newsprint or butcher paper with crayons or markers. When all groups have completed their graphics, they will present them to the class, explaining why they chose the elements they used. Finished graphics can be displayed on a class bulletin board, on walls, or on a Web page. Finally, students will write an individual essay analyzing one element of the novel.

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.

The "This American Life" crew spends five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where 29 current and recent students were shot during 2012. The listener gets a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances. This is a primary source with a lesson plan included in the narrative.

Students read a work of realistic fiction about bullying and gain understanding through writing, Readers Theatre, and discussion.

Lesson Description:  Overview: When talking to numerous departments at Reinhart Foodservice, all department heads emphasized the need for communication between departments and wanting to hire employees who possess excellent soft skills. For this unit, students will complete a job experience, job shadow, or community service experience where they will observe communication at the workplace as well as note examples of soft skills in the workplace. Students will also explain how they used communication skills and soft skills. Finally, they will present their findings in a PowerPoint presentation.Learning Goals:  Students will be able to:Complete a job experience, job shadow, or community service experienceStudents will articulate soft skills seen in the experienceStudents will explain how they used communication skills and soft skillsStudents will present their findings in a presentation

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.

Collaborative, self-directed learners use a variety of reading strategies to analyze, understand, and create personal enrichment, inquiry, and problem solve when engaging with Markus Zusak's historical fiction novel, The Book Thief. Students will learn about the backdrop of the novel in the Holocaust era of World War II through multi-faceted activities like documentaries, web quests, news articles, and first-hand accounts to better understand how the set of a novel affects the plot and character development. An additional layer of inquiry derives from a literary perspective: exploring character motivations and relationships, color symbolism, figurative language, point-of-view, and theme.

Collaborative, self-directed learners use a variety of reading strategies to analyze, understand, and create personal enrichment, inquiry, and problem solve when engaging with Markus Zusak's historical fiction novel, The Book Thief. Students will learn about the backdrop of the novel in the Holocaust era of World War II through multi-faceted activities like documentaries, web quests, news articles, and first-hand accounts to better understand how the set of a novel affects the plot and character development. An additional layer of inquiry derives from a literary perspective: exploring character motivations and relationships, color symbolism, figurative language, point-of-view, and theme.

In this lesson tied to Common Core State Standards for English/Language Arts, students receive support as they read a complex informational text about honeybees. The teacher facilitates a close reading and writing a response-to-text.

This is a great lesson to do either in the middle of the novel or as an introductory lesson. It is a great way for students to make connections to the content in the novel.

This is an excellent way to assess students' understanding of a multitude of literary and comprehension elements when reading The House on Mango Street. It provides excellent examples as to what students can do as far as activities as well.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and one of his first encounters with racial discrimination.  This resource can be an aid in a unit of nonfiction/history/civil rights.

Paraphrasing helps students make connections with prior knowledge, demonstrate comprehension, and remember what they have read. Through careful explanation and thorough modeling by the teacher in this lesson, students learn to use paraphrasing to monitor their comprehension and acquire new information. They also realize that if they cannot paraphrase after reading, they need to go back and reread to clarify information. In pairs, students engage in guided practice so that they can learn to use the strategy independently. Students will need prompting and encouragement to use this strategy after the initial instruction is completed. The lesson can be extended to help students prepare to write reports about particular topics.

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.