This lesson challenges students' views of Native Americans as a vanished people by asking them to compare their prior knowledge with information they gather while reading about contemporary Native Americans.

Students explore poetry about sports, looking closely at the use of onomatopoeia. After viewing a segment of a sporting event, students create their own onomatopoeic sports poems.

After reading The Tempest or any other play by William Shakespeare, students work in small groups to plan, compose, and perform a choral reading based on a character or theme.

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 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 read texts by Dybek, Dickens, Poe, and Morrison to explore how authors use language to create setting and, in turn, how setting constructs other elements in a literary work.

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 read Raymond Carver's story "A Small, Good Thing," focusing on characterization in order to develop one of the static characters—the hit-and-run driver who causes Scotty's death—more fully.

Students analyze the Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "We Real Cool" and then write about how the character's pool hall days might influence who the character becomes fifty years in the future.

Students analyze images of Oscar Wilde used to publicize his 1882 American lecture tour. They then compare a caricature to another researched image, sharing this analysis in a podcast.

Students in the 21st century need to build background knowledge and fill in textual gaps to enter the unfamiliar world of "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street."