his lesson uses music and art in a vocabulary study of unfamiliar words from the song "America the Beautiful," increasing students' vocabulary while also increasing their knowledge of U.S. geography. A discussion to activate students' prior knowledge about sights and scenery throughout the United States is followed by a read-aloud and introduction to the song "America the Beautiful," which is then sung in each session of the lesson. Students learn the meanings of the song's words through shared reading and the use of context clues and images. Students then use photographs, illustrations, and descriptive language to create a mural shaped like the United States. Finally, through pictures and words, students reflect on what they have learned. This lesson is appropriate and adaptable for any patriotic event or holiday, and many of the vocabulary strategies are adaptable for other texts or word lists, as well.

This patriotic song for kids is about America and I wrote this song from direct responses from children across the United States and what they told me this country means to them. Celebrate our United States of America as we sing about all the things that make this country great and what makes us proud to live in the United States of America. This song is a great song to celebrate the 4th of July, Independence Day, Memorial Day, President's Day or everyday we are able to celebrate our country and freedom.

Lyrics
When I think about America
I think of so many things
It's my country the United States
And it means so much to me

Green, green forests
Green, green forests
Having nice schools
Having nice schools
Voting for the president
Voting for the president
Red, white and blue
Red, white and blue
Playing in my neighborhood
Playing in my neighborhood
Believing in dreams
Believing in dreams
This is America to me

Celebrating holidays
Celebrating holidays
Pledge to our flag
Pledge to our flag
Great big mountains
Great big mountains
Learning all you can
Learning all you can
All different colors
All different colors
Being what you want to be
Being what you want to be
This is America to me

This is America, land that I love
My country the United States
Under one shining sun
So many different people
Together proud and free
This is America
America to me

All kinds of ice cream
All kinds of ice cream
Animals on farms
Animals on farms
Families at Thanksgiving
Families at Thanksgiving
Boats, trains and cars
Boats, trains and cars
Helping each other
Helping each other
People I love
People I love
This is America to me

This is America, land that I love
My country the United States
Under one shining sun
So many different people
Together proud and free
This is America
America to me

This is America, land that I love
My country the United States
Under one shining sun
So many different people
Together proud and free
This is America
America to me
This is America
America to me

Jack Hartmann's website: www.jackhartmann.com

The Américas Award, which began in 1993, was founded by the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP) to encourage and commend authors and illustrators who produce children’s and young adult literature with themes concerning Latin America. More information can be found on the CLASP website (http://claspprograms.org/pages/detail/37). Each year the award names two winners, honorable mentions and commended titles. The books listed in this document are those books which address issues of relevance to teaching about Day of the Dead. Lists of other Américas Award winning books can be found on the CLASP website.

Students read three short stories about women; discuss the development of female characters, gender differences, and society' s expectations; and write scripts in which the characters discuss their similarities and differences.

Students are often asked to perform speeches, but rarely do we require students to analyze speeches as carefully as we study works of literature. In this unit, students are required to identify the rhetorical strategies in a famous speech and the specific purpose for each chosen device. They will write an essay about its effectiveness and why it is still famous after all these years.

By analyzing Dear Abby's rant about bad grammar usage, students become aware that attitudes about race, social class, moral and ethical character, and "proper" language use are intertwined.

Students apply the analytical skills that they use when reading literature to an exploration of the underlying meaning and symbolism in Hieronymous Bosch's early Renaissance painting "Death and the Miser".

Students explore the ballads genre by reading medieval ballads to deduce their characteristics, acting out the ballads, comparing medieval and modern ballads using Venn diagrams, and composing their own ballads.

Allegories are similar to metaphors: in both the author uses one subject to represent another, seemingly unrelated, subject. However, unlike metaphors, which are generally short and contained within a few lines, an allegory extends its representation over the course of an entire story, novel, or poem. This lesson plan will introduce students to the concept of allegory by using George Orwell’s widely read novella, Animal Farm, which is available on Project Gutenberg.

Students listen to fiction and nonfiction read-alouds and explore selected Websites to identify factual information about animals. This lesson focuses on ants, but can be adapted to any animal.

Learn about the physical characteristics of environments and act out the animals that live there!

You are the next contestant on the Take the Stage game show ANIMAL SURVIVAL where you will travel in a hot air balloon to the forest of North America, the savanna of Africa, and then take a submarine ride underwater in the ocean. To play the game, you will act out an animal that would live in each environment, and then write how the physical characteristics of each environment helps your animal survive.

Learning Objective: observe and describe the physical characteristics of environments and how they support populations and communities of plants and animals within an ecosystem.

In this lesson plan, students will learn about the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. In the introductory first lesson, they will see how animals are often used as symbols. In the second lesson, they will hear one of several versions of how the 12 animals were chosen. They will then focus upon a few of the animals in the story and see how they can be used as symbols of certain human characteristics. In the third lesson, they will be introduced to the other animals of the zodiac, and they will be given a chart on which they will assign traits to each animal. Then they will consult a number of websites to find the traits traditionally associated with the animals, which they will add to their list. Then, they will come up with a number of ways to compare and contrast the animals in the list. In the third lesson, they will focus upon the animal associated with the year of their birth, learning about its traits and discussing whether or not these apply to themselves and their peers. Finally, each student will make an acrostic, combining the letters of his or her first name with adjectives that relate to his or her zodiac sign.

Kirsten Lepore is an artist and filmmaker who works with different animation techniques, including stop-motion animation and claymation. With these videos, learn more about the intentions behind her food-focused film, the unusual materials she works with to create her projects, and why she loves the laborious process of stop-motion animation. Lepore also demonstrates the basics of shooting a stop-motion animation film.

The purpose of this project is two-fold: first, to encourage students to make the reading of poetry a creative act; and, second, to help students appreciate particular literary devices in their functions as semaphores or interpretive signals. Those devices that are about the imagery of a poem (metaphor, simile, personification, description) can be thought of as magnifying glasses: we see most clearly that upon which the poet focuses our gaze. Similarly, those poetic devices that are about the sound of the poem (alliteration, consonance, enjambment, onomatopoeia, and repetition) can be thought of as volume buttons or amplifiers: we hear most clearly what the poet makes us listen to most attentively.

Learn about actress Anna May Wong—the first Chinese American Hollywood movie star, producer and one of the most influential style icons of her time, in this resource from Unladylike2020. Throughout Wong’s career, she encountered racism and stereotyping in the roles she was offered, but in the end she found a way to flourish as an actor on her own terms starring in 60 films. Using video, discussion questions, vocabulary, teaching tips, and an in-class activity, students learn about Wong’s place in Hollywood history and how she was impacted by important events in American history, like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and anti-miscegenation laws.

Drawing upon the online archives of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, this lesson helps students to put the events described by Anne Frank into historical perspective, and also serves as a broad overview of the Nazi conquest of Europe during World War II. After surveying the experiences of various countries under Nazi occupation, the lesson ends with activities related specifically to the Netherlands and Anne Frank.

This lesson concentrates on Anne Frank as a writer. After a look at Anne Frank the adolescent, and a consideration of how the experiences of growing up shaped her composition of the Diary, students explore some of the writing techniques Anne invented for herself and practice those techniques with material drawn from their own lives.

Apexer is a street artist who creates colorful, spray-painted murals around the world. Using a visual foundation based in graffiti art and Chinese calligraphy, Apexer abstracts letterforms to create complex, dynamic compositions for his street art projects. Often creating artworks that communicate the vibe of the neighborhood where they are on view, Apexer’s painted gestures are accessible to a wide audience, and are constantly expanding upon the core element of his work: the letters of his nickname.