Drawing upon the online archives of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, this lesson helps students to put the events described by Anne Frank into historical perspective, and also serves as a broad overview of the Nazi conquest of Europe during World War II. After surveying the experiences of various countries under Nazi occupation, the lesson ends with activities related specifically to the Netherlands and Anne Frank.
This lesson concentrates on Anne Frank as a writer. After a look at Anne Frank the adolescent, and a consideration of how the experiences of growing up shaped her composition of the Diary, students explore some of the writing techniques Anne invented for herself and practice those techniques with material drawn from their own lives.
Students explore the artistry that helped make Washington Irving our nation's first literary master and ponder the mystery that now haunts every Halloween--What happened to Ichabod Crane?
To what shared principles did the Founding Fathers appeal as they struggled to reach a compromise in the Constitutional Convention? In this lesson, students will learn how the Founding Fathers debated then resolved their differences in the Constitution. Learn through their own words how the Founding Fathers created “a model of cooperative statesmanship and the art of compromise."
In this lesson, students will look behind the story at the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that shape the narrative throughout Esperanza Rising. The lesson also invites students to contemplate some of the changes Esperanza undergoes as she grows into a responsible young woman and the contradictions that she experiences.
The federal judiciary, which includes the Supreme Court as well as the district and circuit courts, is one of three branches of the federal government. This lesson provides an introduction to the Supreme Court.
In 1691, a group of girls from Salem, Massachusetts accused an Indian slave named Tituba of witchcraft, igniting a hunt for witches that left 19 men and women hanged, one man pressed to death, and over 150 more people in prison awaiting a trial. In this lesson, students will explore the characteristics of the Puritan community in Salem, learn about the Salem Witchcraft Trials, and try to understand how and why this event occurred.
To appreciate some of the extra-literary elements of a play, students pause at various intervals in their study of Thornton Wilder's Our Town to develop their own settings, characters, and conflicts.
In this lesson, students study issues related to independence and conceptions of masculinity in Ernest Hemingway’s “Three Shots” as they conduct in-depth literary character analysis, consider the significance of environment to growing up and investigate Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning, unique prose style. In addition, they will have the opportunity to write and revise a short story based on their own childhood experiences and together create a short story collection.
Centered on poems about the natural world, this lesson encourages students, first, to make the reading of poetry a creative act; and, second, to appreciate particular literary devices in their functions as semaphores or interpretive signals.