Students create a persuasive case calling for the adoption of a particular young adult literature title into their school's language arts curriculum by writing letters or speeches.

Students read a variety of picture books that contain elements of the hero's journey and use an online interactive tool to analyze the stories.

Adapted from Sheryl L. Finkle and Tamara J. Lilly's Middle Ground: Exploring Selected Literature from and about the Middle East, this variation on traditional literature circles exposes students to a variety of young adult fiction from and about the Middle East. Students read and share research and responses in collaborative groups. At the end of the lesson, they write a letter to welcome an immigrant student to their school and community.

Students examine text closely and create annotations to make personal and meaningful connections with the work.

This lesson allows teachers to enrich students' oral and written vocabulary using the EASE sequence of instruction: Enunciate, Associate, Synthesize, and Emphasize the words you want students to use.

Students examine three examples of revisionist fairy tales in which female characters act in empowered roles rather than behaving helpless and submissive.

Using their prior knowledge of books containing letters, students show their understanding of genre by rewriting a story and reflecting on how traditional stories differs from stories told in letters.

Students select a book to read based only on its cover art. After reading the book, they use an interactive tool to create a new cover for it.

Using picture books as mentor texts, students learn effective strategies for organizing information that compares and contrasts. Students can then apply appropriate organizational strategies to their own papers.

Students begin by writing a sentence or two each week and progress to daily reflections and records of their school activity. Families respond to these student reflections, which become the basis for discussion among family, teacher, and students.

Students explore book covers of a variety of books then create a new cover for a book they have read.

Students use fractured fairy tales to practice revision and editing as separate activities when they write their own versions of fairy tales.

Nikki Giovanni's poem "The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr." is paired with Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, taking students on a quest through time to the Civil Rights movement.

Students explore familiar literary characters, usually first encountered as adults, but whose childhood stories are only told later. Students then create childhoods for adult characters from books of their choice.

Students explore the concepts of audience and purpose by focusing on an issue that divided Americans in 1925, the debate of evolution versus creationism raised by the Scopes Monkey Trial.

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

This lesson uses the "1984" Macintosh Commercial to introduce students to dystopian characteristics. Students analyze techniques used in the commercial and identify the comments that it makes about contemporary society.

Students write a persuasive letter to the editor of a newspaper from a selected fictional character's perspective, focusing on a specific issue or situation explored in the novel.