This flag football playbook is designed to help students learn the basic rules of flag football.

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

Learn how writer Zora Neale Hurston incorporated and transformed black folklife in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By exploring Hurston's own life history and collection methods, listening to her WPA recordings of folksongs and folktales, and comparing transcribed folk narrative texts with the plot and themes of the novel, students will learn about the crucial role of oral folklore in Hurston's written work.

This lesson plan is the second in the "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community" series. It provides a video of the poet Claudia Rankine reading the poem "from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman standing]" and a companion lesson with a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.

This lesson plan is the fifth in the "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community" series. It provides an audio recording of the poet, Minnie Bruce Pratt, reading the poem "The Great Migration." 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.

This document provides a concise but practical overview of the dimensions of text complexity. It also provides applicable and accessible examples of the application of these principles to texts commonly taught in English and language arts classrooms.

This accessible overview of principles of vocabulary instruction describes the three tiers of words and how to integrate effective vocabulary instruction into curriculum. It also includes a list of links and articles that provide additional information about vocabulary learning.

Although the most recent edition of this book was published in 2002, this handbook offers a list of engaging and accessible books as well as websites for students who are reluctant to read.

This Teaching Channel resource includes a 3 minute video that models how to set up literature circles with ELL students, but the strategies and approaches are applicable to all students. It also includes a lesson plan and supporting materials, including handouts about roles and academic talk.

The lessons in this unit are designed to help your students recognize how people of different cultures and time periods have used cloth-based art forms (quilts) to pass down their traditions and history.

This website gives an overview and examples of multisensory reading strategies. This is geared toward preschool and elementary school teachers, but it provides a helpful context for understanding these strategies in lower grades and may help educators apply them to higher grades.

Students will learn about the impact of enjambment in Gwendolyn Brooks' short but far-reaching poem "We Real Cool." One element of this lesson plan that is bound to draw students in is a compelling video of working-class Bostonian John Ulrich reciting the poem.

This slideshow will give links to book lists, example templates and instructional videos to help teachers in all content areas promote literacy and increase engagement

An English language skills textbook to help ESL students acquire communication skills in the community (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) The book is aimed at CLB levels 5/6 focusing on intercultural skills and essential skills: reading text, document use, writing, oral communication, thinking skills, working with others, and computer use.

These articles look at the difficulty of teaching literacy in secondary schools and the reasons content-area teachers may balk when asked to teach reading explicitly.

A high school teacher describes an assignment in which students study the histories and social reception of words (in some cases considered obscenities) used to insult people of various social categories. Students come to recognize the powerful, sometimes damaging effects of language, enabling them to fight those effects intellectually. Many derogatory terms are cited as examples in this essay.

Book Love addresses student apathy head on, first by recognizing why students don't read assigned readings or for pleasure. The book provides advice for helping students find books that are right for them, building in time to read, reflect, and share. The website provides workshop handouts, reading lists, videos, etc. In the article, “Let them read, please” Penny describes what it takes to build a culture of reading in secondary schools.

Learn how to make inferences in literature, nonfiction and real life, and to support those inferences with strong, reliable evidence.

An inference is just coming to a logical conclusion from whatever evidence you have. It’s one of the most valuable thinking skills you can learn.

The ability to make inferences is one of the things that make a person what we call “smart.” And we say the person who can’t make inferences is “a little slow on the uptake,” right?, because other people figure out what’s going on more quickly than he or she does. We have to spell things out explicitly for that person.

So, when your teacher says he or she is going to help you learn how to make good inferences, imagine in your head that he or just said that you’re going to learn how to be smart today. You’re going to learn how to think, because, ultimately, that’s what making inferences is all about.