Students explore the motivation behind characters' actions in "To Kill A Mockingbird" by creating psychological profiles for characters from the novel.

In this lesson, to help you enter into the world of A Tale of Two Cities, you will think about Dickens’s time period and the reasons that he wrote a novel that takes place before he was born.In this lesson, to help them enter into the world of A Tale of Two Cities, students will think about Dickens’s time period and the reasons that he wrote a novel that takes place before he was born.

A short quiz on CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.3, featuring a passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth. The passage has a Dale-Chall text difficulty level of 7-8, and a Flesch-Kincaid level of 7.0. (However, these metrics are not designed for poetry.)

This short video takes viewers through the journey that Frankenstein makes throughout the novel. Each location is shown close up on a map with a brief description of what occurs in each location.

In this lesson, students will analyze archetypes and how they contribute to universal story telling and character development.

In this module, students engage with literature and nonfiction texts that develop central ideas of guilt, obsession, and madness, among others. Building on work with evidence-based analysis and debate in Module 1, students will produce evidence-based claims to analyze the development of central ideas and text structure. Students will develop and strengthen their writing by revising and editing, and refine their speaking and listening skills through discussion-based assessments.

This lesson combines Oedipus the King and Aristotle's Poetics. Students will look at both pieces and write an argumentative essay as their assessment.

In this module, students will read, discuss, and analyze contemporary and classic texts, focusing on how complex characters develop through interactions with one another and how authors structure text to accomplish that development. There will be a strong emphasis on reading closely and responding to text dependent questions, annotating text, and developing academic vocabulary in context.

The 11th grade learning experience consists of 7 mostly month-long units aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with available course material for teachers and students easily accessible online. Over the course of the year there is a steady progression in text complexity levels, sophistication of writing tasks, speaking and listening activities, and increased opportunities for independent and collaborative work. Rubrics and student models accompany many writing assignments.Throughout the 11th grade year, in addition to the Common Read texts that the whole class reads together, students each select an Independent Reading book and engage with peers in group Book Talks. Students move from learning the class rituals and routines and genre features of argument writing in Unit 11.1 to learning about narrative and informational genres in Unit 11.2: The American Short Story. Teacher resources provide additional materials to support each unit.

Set in the Dominican Republic during the rule of Rafael Trujillo, In the Time of the Butterflies fictionalizes historical figures in order to dramatize the Dominican people's heroic efforts to overthrow this dictator's brutal regime. In the following activities, students will examine the actions of the characters in the novel and discuss an all encompassing definition for courage.

In this module, students read, discuss, and analyze nonfiction and dramatic texts, focusing on how the authors convey and develop central ideas concerning imbalance, disorder, tragedy, mortality, and fate.

This lesson is designed to apply Common Core State Standards and facilitate a comparison of informational texts and primary source material from the Scottsboro Boys trials of the 1931 and 1933, and the fictional trial in Harper Lee's novel, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960).

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.

In this resource, students will be asked to use a graphic organizer in order to identify and track the development of theme and character in a literary text. Students will use evidence from the text to construct an evidence based response.

A short quiz on CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.3, featuring a passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth. The passage has a Dale-Chall text difficulty level of 7-8, and a Flesch-Kincaid level of 7.0. (However, these metrics are not designed for poetry.)

Students often struggle to find theme in literature--one that is not a bumper sticker, a "moral to the story," or anything that could be applied to more than one story.  Understanding what theme is, an implicit argument the author is making, is the first step.  Then it gets more complicated as they realize that there are wrong answers (the ones that don't make sense with the story), there are undeveloped answers (ones that don't get far enough past motif but are on the right track), and there are many possible correct answers that can be explained and supported with the text. This activity uses the Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate strategy in small groups to help students focus on the details of the story and how they contribute to the overall point of the story.  It can be used with any piece of literature you deem appropriate for your students.

Students will read and analyze a short story from the Southern Gothic genre entitled "The Life you Save May be Your Own" by Flannery O'Conner.  They will continue to explore the ideas of human compassion and morality by examining the apparent  lack of compassion in the characters of Mr. Shiftlet and the old woman, Lucynell Crater.  Students will use close reading strategies to identify examples of indirect characterization that contribute to their analysis of these two central characters in the text. Image source: "Mockingbird" by skeeze on Pixabay.com.