Boom! Br-r-ring! Cluck! Moo!: Everywhere you turn, you find exciting sounds. Students use these sounds to write their own poems based on Dr. Seuss's "Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?"

Draft letters ask students to think critically about their writing on a specific assignment before submitting their work to a reader. This lesson explains and provides models for the strategy.

Students analyzing a play can map out the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution for a variety purposes. This interactive is aimed at secondary students.

Introduce gerunds and review nouns, adjectives, and verbs through engaging read-alouds; then apply these concepts through collaborative word-sorting and poetry-writing activities.

Do their minds go blank when they confront a blank piece of paper? Speedwriting can help students get started on writing and come up with topics to write about. They can then incorporate their key ideas and phrases into a narrative with the help of a graphic story organizer.

Students examine three examples of revisionist fairy tales in which female characters act in empowered roles rather than behaving helpless and submissive.

Students demonstrate their knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships by creating original comic strips and sharing their completed work in an oral presentation format.

In this unit, students will take a look at the historical vision of the American Dream as put together by our Founding Fathers. They will be asked: How, if at all, has this dream changed? Is this dream your dream? First students will participate in an American Dream Convention, acting as a particular historical figure arguing for his or her vision of the American Dream, and then they will write an argument laying out and defending their personal view of what the American Dream should be.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Students read and annotate closely one of the documents that they feel expresses the American Dream.
Students participate in an American Dream Convention, acting as a particular historical figure arguing his or her vision of the American Dream.
Students write a paper, taking into consideration the different points of view in the documents read, answering the question “What is the American Dream now?”
Students write their own argument describing and defending their vision of what the American Dream should be.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.

What has been the historical vision of the American Dream?
What should the American Dream be? (What should we as individuals and as a nation aspire to?)
How would women, former slaves, and other disenfranchised groups living during the time these documents were written respond to them?

BENCHMARK ASSESSMENT: Cold Read

During this unit, on a day of your choosing, we recommend you administer a Cold Read to assess students’ reading comprehension. For this assessment, students read a text they have never seen before and then respond to multiple-choice and constructed-response questions. The assessment is not included in this course materials.

In this lesson, students will share their work with their classmates and celebrate their accomplishments.

In this 5-day unit, students will explore the topic of cheating. Cheating seems to be ever-present in today’s society. Whether we are talking about athletes being busted for using steroids or students “sharing” answers and plagiarizing on final exams, one thing is clear—there’s a whole lot of cheating going on. In this unit, students will take a look at some contemporary instances of cheating and argue whether under certain situations cheating is not only excusable, but also justifiable.

In this lesson, students will share annotations and discuss the articles “Don’t Alter Models’ Bodies” and “Is Photoshop Destroying America’s Body Image?” Then they will write an argument in which they state their claim, present relevant evidence, and respond to counterarguments.

In this lesson, you will take the writing portion of the culminating assessment. You will continue to use the skills you have learned in the first three lessons of this unit.Today, students will take the writing portion of the culminating assessment.They will reflect on all the material they have read in this unit, and they will use their understanding of all the material presented to them to write an essay. You will evaluate their work in both reading comprehension and writing.

This unit uses William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing as a vehicle to help students consider how a person is powerless in the face of rumor and how reputations can alter lives, both for good and for ill. They will consider comedy and what makes us laugh. They will see how the standards of beauty and societal views toward women have changed since the Elizabethan Age and reflect on reasons for those changes. As students consider the play, they will write on the passages that inspire and plague them and on topics relating to one of the themes in the play. Finally, they will bring Shakespeare’s words to life in individual performances and in group scene presentations.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Students read Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing .
Students read two Shakespearean sonnets and excerpts from an Elizabethan morality handbook dealing with types of women, and they respond to them from several different perspectives.
For each work of literature, students do some writing. They learn to write a sonnet; create a Prompt Book; complete a Dialectical Journal; and write an analytical essay about a topic relating to a theme in the play.
Students see Shakespeare’s play as it was intended to be seen: in a performance. They memorize 15 or more lines from the play and perform them for the class. Students take part in a short scene as either a director or an actor.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.

What are society’s expectations with regard to gender roles?
Does humor transcend time? Do we share the same sense of humor as our ancestors?
How do we judge people?
How important is reputation?

BENCHMARK ASSESSMENT (Cold Read)

During this unit, on a day of your choosing, we recommend you administer a Cold Read to assess students’ reading comprehension. For this assessment, students read a text they have never seen before and then respond to multiple-choice and constructed-response questions. The assessment is not included in this course materials.

CLASSROOM FILMS

The Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing is available on DVD through Netflix and for streaming through Amazon. Other versions are also available on both sites.

In this lesson, students will revise the final couplet of their sonnet, learn more about the characters in Much Ado About Nothing, and begin their Dialectical Journal. Finally, they will use their developing understanding of iambic pentameter to analyze Shakespeare’s language choices.

In this lesson, students will come to see how the concept of deception can be looked at in more than one way and how this factors into Much Ado About Nothing ’s character development.

In this lesson, students will take a closer look at the villain of this play. Is Don John really so evil? Has evil been done to him? Then they’ll learn about Dogberryisms and see whether they can interpret some of them themselves.

In this lesson, students will continue reading Much Ado About Nothing aloud and then compare and contrast the directorial choices made in two staged versions of act 2, scene 3.

In this lesson, students will analyze the humor in language that is embedded in Much Ado About Nothing and maybe come to appreciate it a little bit more.

The purpose of this second Benchmark Assessment (Cold Write) is to determine what students know about informational writing. Students will respond to a writing prompt, and you will score results as a measure of progress. Following this assessment, students will practice conducting close analysis of various passages from Much Ado About Nothing and continue their character analysis by writing a Perfect Paragraph.

In this lesson, students will begin reading Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing aloud in class and make predictions based on what they’ve learned so far. For homework, they will finish their sonnet’s final couplet.