This lesson plan introduces students to Thomas Edison’s life and inventions. It asks students to compare and contrast life around 1900 with their own lives and helps students understand the connections between the technological advancements of the early twentieth century and contemporary society and culture.
French Language and World Literature classes will study the works of 19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire and will learn about the connections between the Romantic Movement and themes of 21st-century popular culture.
Students are often gleeful to discover that their reading homework involves only a few short poems. Yet the attentive student realizes that carefully reading a poem involves as much work as reading a short story, article, or passage from a novel. This lesson teaches students how to read a poem so that they are prepared, rather than simply present, for class discussion.
A freshman senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, shocked the country in 1950 when he claimed to possess evidence that significant numbers of communists continued to hold positions of influence in the State Department. In this lesson students will learn about McCarthy's crusade against communism, from his bombshell pronouncements in 1950 to his ultimate censure and disgrace in 1954.
This lesson plan compares the plot and setting characteristics of several versions of the Cinderella tale to teach students about universal and culturally specific literary elements.
This lesson invites students to reconfigure Meg’s journey into a board game where, as in the novel itself, Meg’s progress is either thwarted or advanced by aspects of her emotional responses to situations, her changing sense of self, and her physical and intellectual experiences.
In this lesson, students continue their examination of Tocqueville’s argument about the power of the majority and its consequences. Having suggested previously that the majority can crush a minority without even hearing its screams, he elaborates on the dangers of unchecked and unlimited power in democratic America and how to deal with it.
Using Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a guide, students will consider its relationship between the stories Hawthorne, Poe, and Stephen King. In developing a back story for the science, politics, and supernatural ideas of the Victorian era, students will also explore the emergence of the genre as a whole.
Students examine pictures of household objects from the late 20th century, gather historical information about them from older family members, and then create an in-class exhibit of historical objects from their own homes.
The Preamble is the introduction to the United States Constitution, and it serves two central purposes. First, it states the source from which the Constitution derives its authority: the sovereign people of the United States. Second, it sets forth the ends that the Constitution and the government that it establishes are meant to serve.
