This resource was created by Ted. Peck, in collaboration with Dawn DeTurk, Hannah Blomstedt, and Julie Albrecht, as part of ESU2's Integrating the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education, practice, and coaching.

This lesson guides students through analysis of non-print media as a vehicle for argument.
Added to this are Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographs for them to pick from. It is important to note that the photos contain graphic images.

This lesson guides students through analysis of non-print media as a vehicle for argument.
Added to this are Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographs for them to pick from.

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.

By analyzing Dear Abby's rant about bad grammar usage, students become aware that attitudes about race, social class, moral and ethical character, and "proper" language use are intertwined.

Images can be a useful component in any subject.  This lesson will guide students through an analysis of an image.  Students will use critical thinksing skills to interpret an image. Students will then generate a hypothesis about the source and construct questions for further investigation. 

In this lesson students use the Informational Text Analysis Tool to deconstruct the essential elements of informational text. Informational text is more important to teachers than ever before, especially with the rise of the new Core standards. The Library of Congress is an excellent resource for finding and using texts to build students' reading skills.Through a diverse array of classic and contemporary literature as well as challenging informational and primary source texts, students build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspective.

Can a person be both admirable and flawed at the same time? In this lesson, students will look more closely at the character of Okonkwo. Students will figure out what his most admirable qualities are, as well as some of his flaws. They will also decide whether Okonkwo has the potential to be a tragic hero.

This lesson guides students through analysis of non-print media as a vehicle for argument.

In this lesson Students individually consider a visual text and draw conclusions based on what they see. They write about their conclusions and explain the evidence used to make that determination. Students will be able to analyze a visual text. Students will be able to develop and support a claim about the visual text based on evidence found in the text.

After gaining skill through analyzing a historic and contemporary speech as a class, students will select a famous speech from a list compiled from several resources and write an essay that identifies and explains the rhetorical strategies that the author deliberately chose while crafting the text to make an effective argument. Their analysis will consider questions such as: What makes the speech an argument?, How did the author's rhetoric evoke a response from the audience?, and Why are the words still venerated today?

Students will analyze photos for specific details that reveal the owner of a specific room.Then the analysis will include literature but will focus on literary devices and connotations.Also, students will have the opportunity to summarize text and then use evidence to support specific connotations.

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.

It is important for students to know how to evaluate messages conveyed by the news media. Exploration of the artistic techniques used in political cartoons leads to critical questioning.

Students explore and analyze the techniques that political (or editorial) cartoonists use and draw conclusions about why the cartoonists choose those techniques to communicate their messages.

This interactive PDF explains the four types of writing and their applications, and provides some free examples.

In this lesson, students learn to ask the right questions about the validity of surveys.

There's no question that students will be able to compose good survey questions by the end of this lesson.

This unit is a joint exploration of the genre of Japanese animation (“anime”) and Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey . The unit begins by questioning how stories work in general and what makes a narrative “epic” in particular. After establishing the foundations of narrative analysis and a set of concrete expectations for reading epic stories, the unit dives into the story of Odysseus, pairing it with similar anime narratives. Odysseus is a man who faces extraordinary obstacles, and this theme occurs in many anime series and movies, including Attack on Titan , Evangelion , Spirited Away , and many others. Students will study the content, looking at how the same kind of story is told in different ways with different implications, and they will also look at form: how Homer’s poetry and anime work in their own ways to achieve distinct aesthetic goals. Just as Homer’s poet shines with brilliance, there is also an enormous amount of creativity to bring to the drawn and moving image. By the end of this unit, students will have performed many exercises in close reading and analysis, culminating in their own experiment in the anime form and epic genre.