As part of their study of Richard Wright's Black Boy, students research and reflect on the current black-white racial divide in America. By examining the work of literature in the context of contemporary events, students will deepen their understanding of the work and of what it means to be an American today.
Examining the Legacy of the American Civil Rights Era
Fantastic Characters: Analyzing and Creating Superheroes and Villains
Students analyze characterization by creating their own superheroes or super-villains,
complete with related gadgets and settings.
Songs of Our Lives: Using Lyrics to Write Stories
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.
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick: Using Illustrations to Guide Writing
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.
Facilitating Student-Led Seminar Discussions with The Piano Lesson
August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson invites students to ask a number of questions—big
and small. Students learn how to create effective discussion questions and then put them to use in student-led discussions.
Color My World: Expanding Meaning Potential through Media
Using different writing/drawing materials (e.g., markers, color pencils, pastels, etc.), students learn how to communicate different moods and/or feelings to support their written ideas and how authors do the same through their work.
Comparing Portrayals of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Photography and Literature
In this lesson, students analyze similarities and differences among depictions of slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Douglass' Narrative, and nineteenth century photographs of slaves. Students formulate their analysis of the role of art and fiction, as they attempt to reliably reflect social ills, in a final essay.
Analyzing Famous Speeches as Arguments
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.
American Folklore: A Jigsaw Character Study
Groups of students read and discuss American folklore stories, each group reading a different story. Using a jigsaw strategy, the groups compare character traits and main plot points of the stories. A diverse selection of American folk tales is used for this lesson, which is adaptable to any text set.
An Exploration of The Crucible through Seventeenth-Century Portraits
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.
Guided Reading Strategies with Henry and Mudge
In this lesson, students read Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night as a whole group as the teacher models a questioning strategy. In subsequent sessions, students practice the questioning strategy and reread for fluency.
I Have a Dream: Exploring Nonviolence in Young Adult Texts
Students will identify how Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of nonviolent conflict-resolution is reinterpreted in modern texts. Homework is differentiated to prompt discussion on how nonviolence is portrayed through characterization and conflict. Students will be formally assessed on a thesis essay that addresses the Six Kingian Principles of Nonviolence.
Exploring The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales using Wikis
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.
Creating Psychological Profiles of Characters in To Kill a Mockingbird
Students explore the motivation behind characters' actions in To Kill A Mockingbird by creating psychological profiles for characters from the novel.
Choose, Select, Opt, or Settle: Exploring Word Choice in Poetry
Students investigate the effects of word choice in Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star" to construct a more sophisticated understanding of speaker, subject, and tone.
Using Microblogging and Social Networking to Explore Characterization and Style
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.
Tragic Love: Introducing Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
This lesson introduces students to William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet by having them examine the ideas of tragedy and tragic love by connecting the story to their own lives.
Language and Power in The Handmaid's Tale and the World
Students work in small groups to examine Margaret Atwood's use of and observations about language in The Handmaid's Tale. Through this activity, students discover and articulate overarching thematic trends in the book and then can extend their observations about official or political language to examples from their own world.
Sonic Patterns: Exploring Poetic Techniques Through Close Reading
Students develop close reading skills connecting sound with sense in the poem "Those Winter Sundays," and write an original text that reflects their new learning.
Narrative Structure and Perspectives in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Using Beloved as a model of a work with multiple narrative perspectives, students use a visualizing activity and close reading to consider ways in which subjective values shape contradictory representations.