In this first lesson of the curriculum unit Composition in Painting: Everything in its right place, students will begin by learning the definition of composition in the visual arts and some of its most basic components.
In this lesson, students explore the historical context of Walt Whitman's concept of "democratic poetry" by reading his poetry and prose and by examining daguerreotypes taken circa 1850. Next, students will compare the poetic concepts and techniques behind Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," and have an opportunity to apply similar concepts and techniques in creating a poem from their own experience.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "class struggle" is portrayed as an intensely personal affair, as much a tension within the mind of a single character as a conflict between characters. This lesson activities asks students to consider Gatsby's experiences as not only those of an individual, but as those of a society and culture. Students will closely study the text and exam some of Fitzgerald's letters and other statements.
This lesson plan addresses the ways people learn about events from the past and discusses how historical accounts are influenced by the perspective of the person giving the account. To understand that history is made up of many people’s stories of the past, students interview family members about the same event and compare the ifferent versions, construct a personal history timeline and connect it to larger historical events, and synthesize eyewitness testimony from different sources to create their own "official" account.
About one-third of Patriot soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill were African Americans. Census data also reveal that there were slaves and free Blacks living in the North in 1790 and later years. What were the experiences of African-American individuals in the North in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War?
In this lesson, students put Barack Obama’s election as the first African American President of the United States in historical context by studying two of his speeches and reviewing some of the history of African American voting rights.
The harrowing adventure of four men fighting for survival after a shipwreck is chronicled by Stephen Crane in "The Open Boat." Students learn about narration, point of view, and man's relationship to nature in this classic example of American literary naturalism.
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.
Jane Austen's classic novel offers insights into life in early nineteenth-century England. This lesson, focusing on class and the status of women, teaches students how to use a work of fiction as a primary source in the study of history.
