Students analyze characterization by creating their own superheroes or super-villains, complete with related gadgets and settings.

Students use illustrations from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a guide to write mysteries and then present their stories to the class for students to discuss to which illustration each story corresponds.

August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson invites students to ask a number of questions—big and small. Students learn how to create effective discussion questions and then put them to use in student-led discussions.

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.

Explore the modern significance of an older text, such as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, by asking students to create their own modern interpretation of specific events from the drama.

Students participate in shared reading, choral reading, and readers theater, using books by Bill Martin, Jr. Repeated readings and literary performances help students with their reading accuracy, expression, and rate.

By exploring the decisions points in a tragedy, students consider how the plot of the story can change if the key characters make a different choice at the turning point.

After reading Shakespeare's Hamlet, students identify, analyze, and explain how elements in Botticelli's painting Birth of Venus and examples from the play illustrate the philosophy of Renaissance Humanism.

This lesson plan invites students to consider characters from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Students explore a selected character and write poems about objects associated with that character.

This twist on readers theater has students prepare original news programs based on incidents in a recent reading, as they explore standard literary elements of character, conflict, resolution, and setting.

In this alternative to the traditional book report, students respond to a play they have read by creating a resume for one of its characters.

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.

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

With a crafty pen, Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood to create a new genre and shock his audience. This lesson will help students examine Capote's manipulation of language as he forces his audience to take a different look at murderers and consider a different definition of nonfiction. His unique purpose leaves students an interesting text to consider.

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.

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 use word webs to choose synonyms for generic adjectives and to learn to adjust their word usage for different contexts.