Lesson Plans

410 Result(s)
Grade Range
6-12
"Sí, se puede!": Chávez, Huerta, and the UFW

The United Farm Workers organized to bring attention to the working conditions faced by farmers during the 1960s and 1970s. This lesson provides access to a collection of artifacts and primary sources on the UFW, while also placing César Chávez and Dolores Huerta within the larger civil rights movement of the time.

Grade Range
9-12
Their Eyes Were Watching God: Folk Speech and Figurative Language

Through close readings of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, students will analyze how Hurston creates a unique literary voice by combining folklore, folk language, and traditional literary techniques. Students will examine the role that folk groups play in both their own lives and in the novel. 

Grade Range
9-12
Lesson 1: How "Grand" and "Allied" was the Grand Alliance?

This lesson plan will survey the nature of what Winston Churchill called the Grand Alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union in opposition to the aggression of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Grade Range
6-12
“Cotton Candy” by Edward Hirsch

This lesson plan is the fourth in the “Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community” series. It provides a video of the poet, Edward Hirsch, offering a little backstory, then reading the poem “Cotton Candy.” 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.

Grade Range
6-12
Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad

In this lesson, students will comprehend the organizational structure of the Underground Railroad; learn about one of its most famous conductors, Harriet Tubman; and consider ways that heroines and heroes of slavery resistance should be remembered. 

Grade Range
6-8
Animating Poetry: Reading Poems about the Natural World

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.

Grade Range
6-12
“Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye

This lesson plan provides a sequence of activities that you can use with your students before, during, and after reading Gate A-4. Use the whole sequence, or any of the activities, to help your diverse students enter and experience the poem.

Grade Range
9-12
Seeing Sense in Photographs & Poems

Through close study of Alfred Stieglitz’ 1907 photograph "The Steerage" and William Carlos William's 1962 poem "Danse Russe," students will explore how poetry can be, in Plutarch’s words, "a speaking picture," and a painting (or in this case a photograph) can be "a silent poetry."