Everyone knows that Star Wars character Darth Vader is a villain. This lesson asks students to explore how they know such things about heroes and villains they encounter in texts.

Students compare attending a performance at The Globe Theater with attending a modern theater production or movie. They then create a commercial for an Elizabethan audience promoting a modern product.

Students use both analytical and creative skills to adapt passages from a novel with significant internal dialogue and conflict, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, into a ten-minute play.

Students explore the genre of commercial endorsements, establishing characteristics and requirements for the genre. Each student then composes an endorsement of a product, service, company, or industry.

Students walk through the process of creating technical instructions by analyzing existing instructions, choosing an audience, writing their own instructions, receiving user feedback, and then revising and publishing their instructions.

Students compare and analyze novels and the movies adapted from them. They design new DVD covers and a related insert for the movies, reflecting their response to the movie version.

Students explore the ballads genre by reading medieval ballads to deduce their characteristics, acting out the ballads, comparing medieval and modern ballads using Venn diagrams, and composing their own ballads.

Students are introduced to the genre of multimedia presentations through a review and analysis of online presentations. They then apply what they have learned to create their own multimedia presentations.

This lesson gives students the tools they need to consider the ethical issues surrounding use and ownership of copyrighted materials.

Students explore the genre of posters, review informational writing and visual design, and then design poster presentations to share in class or at a school-wide fair.

Students research and report on instances of how copyright laws have adapted to encompass new technologies. They write articles predicting copyright issues that may arise with new and future technologies.

Students investigate how and why copyright law has changed over time, and apply this information to recent copyright issues, creating persuasive arguments based on the perspective of a particular group.

Students investigate issues of plagiarism, fair use, and paraphrasing using KWL charts, discussion, and practice.

This lesson uses a letter-writing activity based on Tim O'Brien's story "The Things They Carried" to build empathy as students examine the weight they symbolically carry in their own lives.

Pairs of students respond to literature alternately in shared journals. Mini-lessons are presented on responding to prompts, creating dialogue, adding drawings, and asking and answering questions.

Students learn about memory by doing a memory-writing exercise, studying the brain to understand how it affects memory, reading Li-Young Lee's poem "Mnemonic," and creating projects to demonstrate their understanding.