In this lesson, students are introduced to Cubist and Precisionist painting, and they explore how the poetry of William Carlos Williams adapts similar artistic strategies. Students learn how to analyze a painting, create Cubist- and Precisionist-inspired drawings in response to Williams's poetry, and write an essay comparing Williams's poem “The Great Figure” to Charles Demuth's ekphrastic response to that poem in his painting The Figure 5 in Gold.

This website provides an overview of principles of effective vocabulary instruction as well as ideas for vocabulary study geared specifically towards supporting English language learners.

This lesson plan asks students to create a new, original film or podcast that is based on a specific element from a text (either a film, written text, or podcast). Students will analyze their chosen text, focusing specifically on character, theme, narrative style, use of sound, or setting analysis. This project will be taught asynchronously over the course of 5-6 class periods. 

This book includes a comprehensive look at sociolinguistic aspects of the English language, such as historical, cultural, and environmental influences.

Facilitating student-to-student discussion provides students an opportunity to deliberate essential questions facing their community. This is an authentic practice to build and practice content knowledge, civic skills, and dispositions.

This lesson plan reviews direct and indirect characterizations, which students can use to aid them in writing a character analysis short essay.  Students will be introduced to the S.T.E.A.L. method, which they will use to identify a character's traits, motives, and physiological makeup.  This resource has been created for secondary levels. This lesson plan can be used to supplement any Literary Element Unit.

In this Cult of Pedagogy podcast, Kristy Louden offers some practical suggestions for teachers to use as they give feedback to student writing throughout the writing process. The goal in delaying the grade is to help students apply feedback rather than see it as a final assessment of their work.

The author presents detailed lessons for engaging students in contrastive analysis and exploring code-switching in words by Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Harper Lee, and others.

Students will learn the potential costs and benefits of social media, digital consumption, and our relationship with technology as a society in the three-week lesson. This inquiry based unit of study will answer the following questions:

Essential Question: How can we use science fiction’s ability to predict the future to help humanity?

Supportive Questions 1: What predictions of future development has science fiction accurately made in the past? This can include technology, privacy, medicine, social justice, political, environmental, education, and economic.

Supportive Question 2: What predictions for future development in contemporary science fiction are positive for the future of humanity? What factors need to begin in your lifetime to make these predictions reality?

Supportive Question 3: What predictions for future development in contemporary science fiction are negative for the future of humanity? What factors need to begin in your lifetime to stop these negative outcomes?

(Thumbnail is a screenshot of the OER Commons lesson page, taken 7/26/2022 by Christina Nelson.)

Children will act out the story with a beginning, middle, and end. Children will be able to identify body parts, review and label several color words, and use rhyming to predict what will be painted next.  

In partnership with the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the LAII developed a curriculum guide to provide hands-on art activities and literacy exercises to bring Día de los Muertos to the classroom.

Genuis Hour project idea for ELA researching a topic of student's choice regarding WWII and/or the Holocaust. Preview image Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Although this blog title emphasizes teaching students to analyze nontraditional texts, teachers too will appreciate the strategies the author suggests for learning to conduct textual analysis.

Includes suggestions for how to increase student engagement and participation during class discussions.

The author describes an eighth-grade language unit that helps students understand the value of dialects and standardized English.

Provides evidence-based strategies to support students (geared towards a university audience but many of the suggestions can be adapted/used in secondary contexts).

In this online book, Traci Gardner defines the process of standards-based writing assignment design and assessment with a research-based approach.

This is an example of the Genre Planning Chart you will submit for Evidence of Preparation and Planning.

By examining primary sources, including songs, newspapers, interviews, and photographs of migrant farm workers in California during the Great Depression, students create a scrapbook from the point of view of a migrant worker, providing evidence of the colloquial speech used by the migrants and the issues affecting their lives. Using Voices from the Dust Bowl, 1940-1941 and Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, students select photographs and use the sound recordings of voices of the migrant workers to create captions, letters, and/or songs based on these primary sources. This lesson can be used in connection with a unit on the Great Depression, and specifically on The Grapes of Wrath.