Students learn about the life and music of John Lennon, write a short story from their lives integrating lyrics from some of their favorite songs, and create a class book of stories.

Students use illustrations from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a guide to write mysteries and then present their stories to the class for students to discuss to which illustration each story corresponds.

After critiquing a list of conventions for the genre, students read, view, or listen to a classic mystery, and then produce a mystery of their own, reflecting on the purposeful ways in which they adhered to or altered the genre conventions.

Students are often asked to perform speeches, but rarely do we require students to analyze speeches as carefully as we study works of literature. In this unit, students are required to identify the rhetorical strategies in a famous speech and the specific purpose for each chosen device. They will write an essay about its effectiveness and why it is still famous after all these years.

In this lesson, students incorporate analyses of characters from The Crucible with examinations of original seventeenth-century portraits of Puritans to create a visual portrait of the character. The project culminates in a "Portrait Gallery Walk" where students present and defend their artwork.

Students study Chaucer's Canterbury Tales not just for its rich language, but also for the insights it provides into the Middle Ages. Using wikis, students collaborate to study both literature and history on their own terms. They create meaning and build information networks using tools Chaucer himself would have loved.

Students use social networking sites to trace the development of characters by assuming the persona of a character on the class Ning and sending a set number of tweets, or status updates.

Students imagine the possibilities afforded by text messaging technology in The Catcher in the Rye; They compare and contrast major forms of communication, select points in the novel to represent with text messages, and share and discuss their creative work.

Students first analyze Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," then use Whitman's poem as a model as they create their own list poems.

Students learn how to differentiate between a news story and a feature story by writing a profile of a classmate.

Students write letters expressing personal views on issues like equal pay, equal education/employment opportunity, and gender roles—and receive these letters six years later.

Students work together to create their own utopias, using blogs as the primary source of publication.

Students use persuasive writing and an understanding of the characteristics of letters to the editor to compose effective letters to the editor on topics of interest to them.

This activity, inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper and the stories of Raymond Carver, challenges students to get inside contemporary life and characters through the creation of monologues.

Students craft comic scripts using clear, descriptive, and detailed writing that shows (illustrates) and tells (directs). After peers create an artistic interpretation of the script, students revise their original scripts.

Students explore the idea of "different Englishes" by reading Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" and writing literacy narratives about their own use of different language for different audiences and purposes.

In this follow-up to writing collaborative catalog poems, students write individual catalog poems about what really matters in their lives, based on Carver's poem "The Car."

Using the structure of a list poem, students combine creative expression with poetic techniques and language exploration in order to write group poems about what really matters in their lives.

Writing a review of an author's work challenges students to develop their critical thinking skills. It provides an opportunity for students to speak their minds—and to enjoy being heard.