Students use the elements of persuasion for a specific audience to demonstrate their understanding of Richard Wright's accessible and engaging coming-of-age novel, "Rite of Passage.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
This lesson examines Native American sovereignty and the Constitutional power granted to the president and the Senate to make treaties with foreign nations. The site presents the Treaty and related documents, including a photograph of the Indian leader, Spotted Tail. Explanatory text, materials for teachers, and links to further resources accompany the documents.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
In 1862, Congress passed and President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Bill, which granted public land and funds to build a transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific Railroad would lay tracks from California heading east, and the Union Pacific Railroad would lay tracks from the Missouri River west. The photograph taken in Placer County, "Grading the Central Pacific Railroad," shows some of the construction. Work on the railroad was physically difficult and at times dangerous, and attracting workers was a challenge. The majority of the Central Pacific's laborers were Chinese. A Chinese worker is shown in the image "Heading (top cut) of East Portal, Tunnel No. 8." Both railroad companies actively recruited Chinese laborers because they were regarded as hard workers and were willing to accept a lower wage than white workers, mostly Irish immigrants. As construction progressed, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific competed to see which could lay the most track each day. A photograph of a sign near Promontory Park, Utah, commemorates the day that Central Pacific crews laid an unprecedented 10 miles of track. The meeting of the two sets of tracks ? the "gold spike" ceremony ? took place on May 10, 1869. Several photographs and drawings depict this historic moment. Now the country was connected as never before: a journey between San Francisco and New York that previously took up to six months now took only days. The photograph "High Bridge in Loop," from Views from a Trip to California, shows a train passing quickly through a mountain pass. The transcontinental railroad allowed people to travel more, farther, and in pleasant conditions, as reflected in the photograph "Commissary Car, 'Elkhorn Club.'" The photograph "Knights of Pythias at the Santa Fe Railway Station, Anaheim" shows an example of the popularity of trains. Even as the transcontinental railroad brought the new country together, it brought change to the world of Native Americans. The tracks ran through a number of tribal territories, bringing into conflict cultures that held very different views of the land and how it might be used and lived on. The painting The First Train, by Herbert Schuyler, depicts three Indians pointing past their encampment at a train in the far distance. The railroad also brought an increasing number of European Americans west. One consequence of this influx was the depletion of the buffalo herds, a major food source for Plains Indians. European Americans would often shoot buffalo for sport from the train; by 1880, the buffalo were mostly gone and Plains Indians had been gathered onto reservations. Millions of acres of open grassland were being settled by the people moving west. Eventually, much of this land became the farmland that fed a growing nation. The transcontinental railroad opened up the West to the rest of the country, even if they never made the trip themselves. A Currier & Ives hand-colored lithograph depicts a train running along the Truckee River in Northern California. The San Francisco publishing firm of Lawrence & Houseworth hired photographers and published photographic tourist catalogs containing views of the West, which they sold commercially. The railroad took hold in popular culture, as shown by sheet music for the song "New Express Galop [sic]." There was even a railroad board game illustrating "Railroads Between New York and San Francisco, California, with Scenes on the Way."
Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Lesson Plan, Primary Source, Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy
The following document analysis worksheet was designed and developed by the Education Staff of the National Archives and Records Administration. You may find this worksheet useful as you introduce students to written documents.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Primary Source, Teaching/Learning Strategy
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.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
In this lesson Students use the Cornell notes tool (developed by Walter Pauk from Cornell University) to do close reading of informational text. Students will be able to read closely and analyze the key details of what they read. Students will be able to summarize informational text.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
The following document analysis worksheet was designed and developed by the Education Staff of the National Archives and Records Administration. You may find this worksheet useful as you introduce students to written documents.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Primary Source, Teaching/Learning Strategy
This textbook follows California Language Arts Standards for grades 9-12 to provide a generalized understanding of composition and to serve as a supplementary aid to high school English teachers.
Material Type: Textbook
After reading "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", by Eric Carle students will use the writing process to write their own version of a Very Hungry story. They will use a flow map for pre-writing. Students will write a rough draft that will be revised and edited with a partner and a teacher.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
The goal of the Listening and Learning Strand is for students to acquire language competence through listening, specifically building a rich vocabulary, and broad knowledge in history and science by being exposed to carefully selected, sequenced, and coherent read_alouds. The 9 units (or domains) provide lessons (including images and texts), as well as instructional objectives, core vocabulary, and assessment materials. The domain topics include: Nursery Rhymes and Fables; Five Senses; Stories; Plants; Farms; Kings and Queens; Seasons and Weather; Colonial Towns; and Taking Care of the Earth. Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .
Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy, Unit of Study
Resources developed by the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning(McREL. A compendium of content standards and benchmarks for K-12 education in both searchable and browsable formats. Resources, including lesson plans align to the Common Core State Standards.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
FreeReading is an open source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. Because it is open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. FreeReading contains, Intervention A, a 40-week scope and sequence of primarily phonological awareness and phonics activities that can support and supplement a typical kindergarten or first grade "core" or "basal" program.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Full Course, Lesson Plan, Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy
This article identifies online lesson plans that can be used to introduce visualizing, a comprehension skill important to both science and literacy learning. Each of the lessons meets NCTE/IRA English language arts standards. The article appears in the free online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which is structured around the seven essential principles of climate science and literacy.
Material Type: Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Guidelines for helping educators deal sensitively with a difficult issue.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
The Skills Strand teaches the mechanics of reading. Students are taught systematic and explicit phonics instruction as their primary tool for decoding written English. By the end of grade 2, students have learned all of the sound spelling correspondences in the English language and are able to decode written material they encounter. In addition to phonics, students also are taught spelling, grammar, and writing during the Skills Strand. A downloadable story "Kits Hats" with illustrations is provided for instruction. Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .
Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading
Using the web-based lessons highlighted in this article, students learn how to pose questions before, during, and after reading nonfiction, fiction, and diagrams. This reading comprehension strategy is included in the literacy column of the magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, a free, online publication for K-5 teachers.
Material Type: Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Given a book, students will be able to identify the details that support its main idea.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Striking images can leave lasting impressions on viewers. In this lesson, students make text-self-world connections to a nature- or science-related topic as they collaboratively design a multimedia presentation.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
The goal of the Listening and Learning Strand is for students to acquire language competence through listening, specifically building a rich vocabulary, and broad knowledge in history and science by being exposed to carefully selected, sequenced, and coherent read-alouds. The 9 units (or domains) provide lessons (including images and texts), as well as instructional objectives, core vocabulary, and assessment materials. The domain topics include: Different Lands, Similar Stories; Fables and Stories; The Human Body; Early World Civilizations; Early American Civilizations; Astronomy; Animals & Habitats; Fairy Tales; and History of the Earth. Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .
Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy, Unit of Study
This is an integrated lesson which is introduced using the book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle. Butterfly metamorphosis is explored through art, math, and writing.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
