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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After reading several examples of how a published author incorporates facts in fiction writing, students research a topic of their choice and write fictional diary entries that incorporate factual information.

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.

Readers are often transported to the places mentioned in texts through words and descriptions. This lesson invites students to create travel brochures about the setting of texts they have read.

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.

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 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.

Students explore and analyze the techniques that political (or editorial) cartoonists use and draw conclusions about why the cartoonists choose those techniques to communicate their messages.

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.

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.

Students analyze the lyrics to Cole Porter's "You're the Top!" and then update them to include current "tops" in pop culture.

Students discuss and compare differing versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" and other tales about wolves in cumulative read-aloud sessions and text set explorations.

In small groups, students closely examine one sentence from the Gettysburg Address and create a multigenre project communicating what they have discovered about the meaning and significance of the text.

By exploring myths and truths surrounding Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, students think critically about commonly believed stories regarding this famous speech from the Civil War era.

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.