MENSA Education & Research Foundation
Intensities in the Classroom
Everyone learns and experiences life differently. A set of lessons about character intensities encourages middle and high schoolers to analyze themselves, their peers, and characters from a book based on the five listed intensities:...
MENSA Education & Research Foundation
Magical Musical Tour: Using Lyrics to Teach Literary Elements
Language arts learners don't need a lecture about poetry; they listen to poetry every day on the radio! Apply skills from literary analysis to famous songs and beautiful lyrics with a lesson about literary devices. As...
Curated OER
Character Builder
Characters in a story are more than a name to remember. Use a character builder worksheet to write out a character's appearance, background, personality, attributes, and story relevance, including whether they are a main or minor...
Illinois State Board of Education
Common Core Teaching and Learning Strategies
Here's a resource that deserves a place in your curriculum library, whether or not your school has adopted the Common Core. Designed for middle and high school language arts classes, the packet is packed with teaching tips, materials,...
Curated OER
"As You Like It" by William Shakespeare
Jacque's soliloquy from Act II, scene ii of As You Like It sets the stage for a close reading exercise that models how to approach difficult, dense text and enables readers to practice reading comprehension and analysis...
Curated OER
Educator's Guide: Holes
You'll be a star at your next grade level meeting with an educational unit on Louis Sachar's Holes. Based on both the novel and film, the lessons include applications to language arts with character studies and movie reviews; social...
Premier Literacy
Point of View
Incorporate technology into a literature lesson plan with an innovative language arts lesson plan. Middle schoolers read an electronic version of original stories or fairy tales, and after determining the point of view, rewrite the...
Curated OER
Shizuko’s Daughter: Problematic Situation
How could you decide which of your late mother's possessions are important enough to take to college with you? Decide which items would be the most valuable to you with an activity based on Kyoko Mori's Shizuko's Daughter. After...
Curriculum Corner
7th Grade ELA "I Can" Statement Posters
Help your seventh graders relate the ELA Common Core standards to their own learning with these "I Can" statement posters. Each standard has been translated into a statement that pupils can understand and placed on its own page for...
Curriculum Corner
7th Grade ELA Common Core Checklists
Track your class's progress on all of the ELA Common Core standards with these handy charts. Along the left side, each seventh grade identifier is listed along with the full text of the standard. As you teach, reteach, assess,...
Storytelling World
Maniac Magee
Add to children's enjoyment of the award-winning novel Maniac Magee with this fun collection of resources. From sequence of events and fact or fiction worksheets, to writing newspaper articles and creating advertisements based...
Warren County Public Schools
Small Group Discussion Questions
Support a class reading of the novel Song of the Trees by Mildred D. Taylor with this series of discussion questions. Covering a variety of topics from character and setting to historical accuracy and symbolism, these questions...
Teacherfiles
Character Grid
Characters are built with more than just what the author directly says about a character (ex: she is smart). Help your pupils focus on several elements of characterization with a graphic organizer that has space for two characters....
Annenberg Foundation
Annenberg Learner: Interactives: Elements of a Story
Explore the elements of a story using the well-known Cinderella story as source material. Learn about setting, character, sequence, exposition, conflict, climax, and resolution.
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Explain Influence of Setting on Plot Development in Literary Text
In this lesson, students will review two elements of fiction, setting and plot, and learn how the setting influences the plot in stories.
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Compare/contrast Themes and Genres in Literary Texts
Determining the theme is not easy; you have to use the clues the author leaves to figure it out yourself. The author implies information about the story through plot points, setting, and characters. You infer and draw conclusions based...
E Reading Worksheets
E Reading Worksheets: Differentiated Reading Instruction Worksheets, Activities
A collection of differentiated reading activities are provided in this collection. Worksheets for the following reading topics are included: climax, story structure, elements of a story; fact and opinion; summarizing, narrative sequence;...
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Characters and Staging in Drama
[Accessible by TX Educators. Free Registration/Login Required] In this lesson, you will analyze how different playwrights characterize, or develop, their protagonists and antagonists through the dialogue and staging of their plays.
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Analyze the Central Characters in Literary Text/fiction
In this lesson, you will discover some ways that writers reveal the complexity of their characters. By closely analyzing one author's characters, you'll come to see how their words, actions, and interactions with one another can shape a...
BBC
Bbc Bitesize Revision: Describing People
As part of a revision and writing section of BBC Bitesize focusing on specific forms of writing, this site discusses describing people as a type of descriptive writing.