Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Students define metaphor and discuss its use in writing and visually. Students develop a personal metaphor and use it to write about their own experience.
Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Lesson Plan
Use wordless picture book, Mirror by Jeannie Parker, to teach writing skills. Even though this lesson is aligned to 6th grade, it can be used across grade levels.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
Explore reading strategies using Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and other works. Students read Poe's works in both large- and small-group readings then conclude with a variety of projects.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Making Evidence-Based Claims ELA/Literacy Units empower students with a critical reading and writing skill at the heart of the Common Core: making evidence-based claims about complex texts. These units are part of the Developing Core Proficiencies Program. This unit develops students' abilities to make evidence-based claims through activities based on a close reading of the Commencement Address Steve Jobs delivered at Stanford University on June, 2005. Find the rest of the EngageNY ELA resources at https://archive.org/details/engageny-ela-archive .
Material Type: Primary Source, Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy, Unit of Study
Welcome to the Teachers' Corner of Small Things Considered. In this section, we include the posts we deem most adequate for teaching purposes. We have reorganized them into subject areas geared for a typical microbiology course. To date, this material has been used for various forms of intellectual enrichment, e.g., suggested readings, class presentations, a source of topics for term papers. You can also find here our Talmudic Questions, which we characterize as those whose answers cannot be found in Google. We are told that some of these questions have been used in exams ranging from tests for undergraduate courses to qualifying/prelims for graduate students.
Material Type: Assessment, Reading
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?
Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
In this unit, students explore social, cultural, and political events that helped define America in the decades following the Second World War. The lesson on the Civil Rights movement revolves around the question: Why did the Montgomery Bus Boycott succeed? In another, students compare speeches by JFK and John Lewis regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the Women in the 1950s lesson plan, students use secondary sources and popular images to explore whether "the happy housewife" was reality or perception. Finally, students will encounter opposing views on whether the Great Society was successful, and what led many Americans came to oppose the Vietnam War.
Material Type: Lesson
Savagery, treachery, lost innocenceÉ "Lord of the Flies" is rife with character development. Use this lesson to help students chart the character changes of Ralph and Jack, both in groups and individually.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
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.
Material Type: Student Guide, Teaching/Learning Strategy
In this resource, students will interpret the meanings of poems using similes and metaphors. The featured resource in the teacher modeling and guided practice sections utilizes the text Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes edited by David Roessel and Arnold Rampersad.
Material Type: Lecture Notes, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Students will display their understanding of the symbolism and references that Dr. King used to enrich his famous speech on August 28, 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by constructing a "jackdaw," a collection of documents and objects.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
