Adapting the song "A-Hunting We Will Go," students put a "whale" in a "pail" and even "take a little "bear" and hug it if we "dare"."

Students must "become" a character in a novel in order to describe themselves and other characters using powerful adjectives.

This recurring lesson encourages students to comprehend their reading through inquiry and collaboration. They choose important quotations from the text and work in groups to formulate "quiz" questions that their peers will answer.

Students compare attending a performance at The Globe Theater with attending a modern theater production or movie. They then create a commercial for an Elizabethan audience promoting a modern product.

his lesson uses music and art in a vocabulary study of unfamiliar words from the song "America the Beautiful," increasing students' vocabulary while also increasing their knowledge of U.S. geography. A discussion to activate students' prior knowledge about sights and scenery throughout the United States is followed by a read-aloud and introduction to the song "America the Beautiful," which is then sung in each session of the lesson. Students learn the meanings of the song's words through shared reading and the use of context clues and images. Students then use photographs, illustrations, and descriptive language to create a mural shaped like the United States. Finally, through pictures and words, students reflect on what they have learned. This lesson is appropriate and adaptable for any patriotic event or holiday, and many of the vocabulary strategies are adaptable for other texts or word lists, as well.

Students read three short stories about women; discuss the development of female characters, gender differences, and society' s expectations; and write scripts in which the characters discuss their similarities and differences.

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.

Students apply the analytical skills that they use when reading literature to an exploration of the underlying meaning and symbolism in Hieronymous Bosch's early Renaissance painting "Death and the Miser".

This lesson is sure to sizzle, not fizzle, as students use comic strips to find onomatopoetic words, develop a vocabulary list from the words, and discuss why writers use onomatopoeia.

Using Construct-a-Word, students learn letter-sound correspondence by combining a beginning letter or blend to a word ending to create words.

Students work together to create classroom rules by brainstorming why they are at school and what they need while they are there.

Students make predictions about the stories and analyze story elements, compare and contrast the different stories, distinguish between fact and opinion, and draw conclusions supported by evidence from their readings.

This lesson uses the "1984" Macintosh Commercial to introduce students to dystopian characteristics. Students analyze techniques used in the commercial and identify the comments that it makes about contemporary society.

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.

The activity includes a series of exercises, in which students view the literal representations of idioms and then examine the metaphorical meanings of the idioms.

The Fractured Fairy Tale tool encourages students to create their own fractured fairy tales.

Students research, evaluate, and synthesize information about the Harlem Renaissance from varied resources, create an exhibit, and highlight connections across disciplines (i.e., art, music, and poetry) using a Venn diagram.

Start the presses! Catchy titles, eye-popping graphics, and attractive fonts are all on students agendas in this lesson as they create magazine covers to summarize a topic.