Reading and Writing a Literary Critique Use the Nine Yardsticks of Value Chart to show how you rate the autobiographical novel Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao. Also, carefully read the following critique and use the chart to indicate what you believe to be the values of the author, “Monkey Bridge,” Cao has a distinctive style [...]
Viewing and Writing about Photos from Around the World Preliminary Activity: Direct students to a website similar to 24 Hours in Pictures . Let them explore the most recent photos, choose three of their favorites and write one sentence response/reaction to those three. They can copy and paste the photo onto a Word document [...]
April 22 is Earth Day as proclaimed by the United Nations in 2009. Here’s an English Language Arts activity you can incorporate into your lessons that will raise awareness of some of the issues important to humankind and especially to Michael Jackson as expressed in his “Earth Song“. Focusing on lyrics fits in nicely with [...]
Keeping a journal as they read helps prepare students for more engaging discussion and elaborated writing. When they have thought deeply about key issues and written words, phrases and sentences to record those thoughts, students are more likely to speak up with confident and write with authority. Here are some journal questions to help your [...]
Spend some time reading poetry and deciding which poem you like well enough to share with the class. (Please select a new poem; one not done for previous assignments or projects). Steps to Selection 1. Select a collection of poems (a collection by the same or by different authors). See our class anthology, Poems 180, [...]
Propaganda, Persuasion and Play-writing Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee Adapted from McDougal Littell Conversation: Lessons of History Includes links to Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts Download Inherit the Wind Lessons Though based on the famous Scopes “Monkey Trail” where William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow clashed over a [...]
Teri Le Sage designed this project to accompany her students’ study of “A LONG WAY GONE: MEMOIRS OF A BOY SOLDIER, Ishmael Beah tells his experience as a child soldier from Sierra Leone”, and Elie Wiesel’s memoir NIGHT, about” a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust [...]
Do you find it tough trying to get yours students to be more precise and use just the right word to express their observations about the author’s tone in piece of writing , director’s tone in film, or the student’s personal response to that work? Here’s a list of terms my students found helpful. I’ve [...]
While the Nine Yardsticks of Value originally were written for use in evaluating fictional works, they can be adapted for deeper reading of more kinds of writing. Take a look, then download Responding to Reading for use in your classroom to aid students in reaching Common Core Standards in reading, writing, and discussing published works. [...]
Taking a Random Walk through the Book: An alternative way to introduce a new fiction on non-fiction reading *****Ask students to write on a piece of paper any ten numbers between the first and last page number of the book you are using. For example, 3,7, 27, 59, 78, 87, 115, 143, 205, 212 *****Next [...]
