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.

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.

This lesson capitalizes on students' interest in social networking by asking students to build an online profile for a minor character in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield.

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.

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

Students create brochures on the same topic as another piece of writing they have done, highlighting how shifting purposes and audiences creates changes in their strategies as writers.

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

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 write letters expressing personal views on issues like equal pay, equal education/employment opportunity, and gender roles—and receive these letters six years later.

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

Students explore a range of resources on fair use and copyright then design their own audio public service announcements (PSAs), to be broadcast over the school's public address system.

Using a hypothetical situation, students generate arguments from opposing points of view, discover areas of commonality using Venn diagrams, and construct logical, audience-specific arguments to persuade their opponents.

The traditional autobiography writing project is given a twist as students write alphabiographies—recording an event, person, object, or feeling associated with each letter of the alphabet.