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.

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.

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.

By conducting interviews, sharing and assessing data, and writing papers based on their authentic research, students reach their own conclusions on the meaning of the American Dream.

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 researching political platforms of past presidents through primary sources and other resources, students create commercials for these presidents using Voki, an online web tool that produces speaking avatars.

In this alternative to the traditional book report, students report on their novel choices using Facebook-like pages.

Students create storyboards to compare and contrast a book and its film adaptation.

Students use A Tale of Two Cities to explore relationships, plot points, character traits, and background by writing text messages between characters within the novel.

After researching various natural disasters, students share their findings with each other using glogs, or through poster presentations.

After reading several poets' personal responses to the September 11th terrorist attacks, students write a "then and now" poem that puts their early memories of the event in conversation with their current understanding of and response to the tragedy.

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.

In this lesson, students will make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections after reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. After sharing and discussing connections, students choose and plan a project that makes a personal connection to the text.

Based on the Guided Comprehension Model developed by Maureen McLaughlin and Mary Beth Allen, this lesson introduces students to the comprehension strategy of monitoring.

Guided comprehension moves your students beyond decoding to become independent readers. Generating questions to guide reading helps readers make connections with the text and supports independent comprehension of new texts.

"That's my position and I'm sticking to it!" After reading about the Korean War, students will take a position in response to an open-ended question, support their position, and evaluate that support.

In an effort to help motivate students to read nonfiction, students are challenged to use a timeline to help them name the year when certain products were invented.

What does the world look like through someone else's eyes? Guide students in using colorful paper glasses to examine a story of school desegregation from multiple perspectives.

Students will learn to skim and scan to make sure they don't flounder when they're surfing the Internet for facts to help them complete riddles about the United States.