In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students examine the nutritional content of different foods and learn about the health benefits and risks associated with the food choices they make.

Working as career counselors for a literary character, students find a job for the character, prepare a resume, and design questions and answers to prepare them for a job interview.

Students analyze propaganda techniques used in pieces of literature and political advertisements. They then look for propaganda in other media, such as print ads and commercials.

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun provides a compelling and honest look into one family's aspirations to move to another Chicago neighborhood and the thunderous crash of a reality that raises questions about for whom the "American Dream" is accessible.

This lesson plan is the ninth in the "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community" series. It provides a video recording of the poet, Joy Harjo, reading the poem "Remember." The companion lesson contains a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.

In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the two basic forms of reproduction for the living things that practice them.

High school students are taught how to use resumes and cover letters to highlight their skills and make them stand out, whether applying to college or for a job.

Students read the renowned novel The Scarlet Letter, exploring and analyzing the themes of sin, compassion, and hypocrisy as they played out in seventeenth-century Puritan New England.

As one of literature's most iconic figures, both Shakespeare's plays and poetry provide an interesting glimpse into a variety of essential themes. In this lesson, students will examine how Shakespeare used the sonnet tradition to enhance his stagecraft by performing a scene from his play Romeo and Juliet.

In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn how animals' physical characteristics, such as jaw structure, are directly related to the function they perform when the animal interacts with its environment.

In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students study a disease outbreak and the investigation that followed to understand the role that public health workers play in protecting the communities they serve.

This set of lessons extends over a few days. Students read and annotate Ernie Pyle's "A Long Thin Line of Anguish." Students complete a SAYS/DOES graphic organizer, working on summarizing the text, noticing the choices the author makes about use of details, and describing the choices the author makes regarding the structure of the article.

Students complete a SOAPStone handout, identifying subject, occasion, author, purpose, speaker and tone (SOAPStone is a pre-AP/AP strategy). Students develop claims about why Ernie Pyle makes the writing choices he makes. Students write an informal, free-response style assessment about the impact of Pyle's choices.

In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn about the varied physical and behavioral adaptations that animals rely on to help them survive changing environmental conditions, such as the arrival of winter.

Emma Bryce explains how one-word sentences illustrate some lexical ambiguities that can turn ordinary words and sentences into mazes that mess with our minds. [3:28]

In previous decades, most news with global reach came from several major newspapers and networks with the resources to gather information directly. The speed with which information spreads now, however, has created the ideal conditions for something called circular reporting. Noah Tavlin sheds light on this phenomenon. [3:42]

Katherine Hampsten describes why miscommunication occurs so frequently, and how we can minimize frustration while expressing ourselves better. [4:32]

Reading, analyzing, and evaluating informational text is a challenge for students. Here are some strategies for helping students complete close reading.

In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn that transitional fossils provide scientists with evidence to establish how major animal groups are related to one another.

Everyone knows that "Star Wars" character Darth Vader is a villain. This lesson asks students to explore how they know such things about heroes and villains they encounter in texts. After examining how moviemakers communicate the villainy of Darth Vader, students examine a passage from Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone that describes the villain Voldemort, noting how Rowling communicates details about the character. Students then read novels in small groups, with each group member tracking a character in a reading log. When they finish their novels, students design posters and present details on their novels to the class. After the presentations, students make observations on how authors develop character and write journal entries reflecting on what they learned.

The corrupting influence of slavery on marriage and the family is a predominant theme in Solomon Northup's narrative Twelve Years a Slave. In this lesson, students are asked to identify and analyze narrative passages that provide evidence for how slavery undermined and perverted these social institutions. Northup collaborated with a white ghostwriter, David Wilson. Students will read the preface and identify and analyze statements Wilson makes to prove the narrative is true.