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.

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.

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.

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 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 read science fiction texts and then use nonfiction texts to extrapolate the scientific principles presented as they discuss the "what ifs" within the context of scientific principles.

This lesson, in which students research worms in order to create a classroom habitat, incorporates reading and writing across content areas as well as math and science activities.

Working in small groups, students read and discuss Elie Wiesel's memoir Night and then take turns assuming the "teacher" role, as the class works with four different comprehension strategies.

Students create alphabet books, which are used as an integrated assessment with science, health, social studies, and any other content area. This lesson plans looks at the theme of community.

During interactive read-aloud sessions, students identify how an author conveys mathematical information about animals' sizes and abilities. They then conduct research projects focusing on the same mathematical concepts.

After reading two math-related books, students investigate their home and school environments to find examples of objects that come in sets and then create their own books on sets.

Students create text sets on a high interest topic and use the texts to practice three strategies for reading for information.

Students listen to fiction and nonfiction read-alouds and explore selected Websites to identify factual information about animals. This lesson focuses on ants, but can be adapted to any animal.

This lesson provides a wealth of ideas for using notes in the classroom to promote authentic writing among children.

This lesson encourages students to use rhyming words to write rebus poetry modeled on rebus books, which substitute pictures for the words that young students cannot yet identify or decode.

To prepare for literature circles featuring historical novels, students research the decades of the 1930s to the 1990s and share their information using Prezi, a web application for creating multimedia presentations.

After students have read a book about the Holocaust, such as The Diary of Anne Frank or Night by Elie Wiesel, students will view Life is Beautiful and complete discussion questions to challenge their ability to analyze literature using film.

This lesson uses One Green Apple by Eve Bunting to teach how characters change across a text. It will also guide students through writing an epilogue to accompany their independent book.

What drives changes to classic myths and fables? In this lesson students evaluate the changes Disney made to the myth of "Hercules" in order to achieve their audience and purpose.