Cluster 2: Craft and StructureArchived

In this lesson, students will analyze the symbols and imagery present in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Rain in Summer" to determine its tone and theme. Formative assessment checks are included in the form of student handouts with text-based questions and charts. Students will also write a mini-essay as a summative assessment in which they will develop a claim about the poem's theme, providing text-based examples as support.

Type: Lesson Plan

Virtually all students, at one point or another in their schooling, are exposed to Longfellow's ballad, "Paul Revere's Ride". How accurate is it? Is it responsible for Revere's ride achieving such iconic status? In this lesson from EDSITEment!, a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities, students will think about the answers to these and other questions as they read primary and secondhand accounts of events during the American Revolution.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will conduct a close reading of the short story "The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs. Students will work to determine the meanings of selected vocabulary words from the story, answer text-dependent questions, and examine a moral of the story, "Be careful what you wish for." In the summative assessment students will write their own narrative that shares the same moral. This lesson includes a vocabulary graphic organizer and key, text-dependent questions and key, a story planning graphic organizer, and a rubric for the narrative.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this unit, students will discover the relevance of Greek mythology as they unravel the story of Pygmalion, the lonely sculptor who carved out of ivory his true love, just like Professor Higgins "carved" out of the slums of London his ideal mate in the stage play Pygmalion. Students will conduct three close readings of Thomas Bulfinch's Pygmalion to answer text-dependent questions, work with vocabulary from the text, and construct a plot diagram of the myth. Students will also work as a class to read an abridged excerpt from Act II of George Bernard Shaw's award winning play, Pygmalion. The plot of the play is augmented with songs from the filmed musical My Fair Lady. Students will compare and contrast key characters and their traits from both texts. In the end of unit assessment, students will create their own narrative version of the Pygmalion myth.

Type: Lesson Plan

A concise lesson plan with a variety of visual links and engaging before, during, and after reading activities.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson (lesson two of a two-lesson unit), students will use Bishop's poem as a model to write their own Florida poem brimming with figurative language and vivid vocabulary. They will also select digital media to reflect the content of their original poems.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this third lesson of a three-part unit, students will explore structure and its affect on theme in poetry. Using pairs of poems about the Holocaust, students will use graphic organizers and rubrics to help them organize their observations into a comparison/contrast essay and Socratic Seminar contributions. The summative assessment for the three-lesson unit is a final draft of an essay (drafted in Part I of the unit) about what separates poetry from prose.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will read the poem "Florida" by Elizabeth Bishop and code the text for positive and negative descriptions of Florida. Students will then explain in writing how connotation and figurative language contribute to the poet's description of Florida.

Type: Lesson Plan

Allusions can be difficult for students and hard to teach because not all students have identical or equally extensive exposure to literature, history, and/or popular culture. To overcome this barrier, this lesson builds a "collective consciousness" in each classroom. Students research an allusion and prepare a visual and oral presentation to each explain their allusions. Students are then assessed on their understanding of the allusions taught in one another's presentations.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson students will use T.S. Eliot's "Macavity" to analyze the power of word choice and figurative language devices in creating coherent and purposefully written descriptions. They will cite text evidence to show how specific lines of the poem impact and drive the description of the character, who happens to be a cat. They will collaborate and discuss the impact of these lines and word choices and then finally write their own coherent and purposefully written descriptions, utilizing the figurative language devices they have identified and analyzed.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will be studying the narrative poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and discussing how a “poem can tell a story.” Students will focus upon citing evidence to support central ideas found in the poem and then using those inferences to complete a comparison/contrast essay. Part of this study will include watching a 4 minute clip from the movie The Blind Side in which Tim McGraw’s character explains the meaning of the poem in terms of a football game between rivals LSU and Ole Miss. Students will be asked to compare and contrast the poem’s meaning in terms of battle in war and battle on the football field, determine how these two situations are similar and different, and finally be asked to explain if the football analogy was helpful in aiding the understanding of the story the poem tells.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will study two poems in this lesson: Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and Dale Wimbrow's "The Guy in the Glass." Students will identify and explain the use of metaphor in each poem, and they will also examine the imagery and personification used in each one. Students will also determine a theme of each poem and explain the similarities and differences in their related themes.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will determine connotative meanings of words and phrases in Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" and analyze their impact on the imagery created.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will study the poem "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" by Vachel Lindsay. Students will identify the examples of imagery within the poem and determine how the use of imagery contributes to the poem's meaning. Students will also practice making connections between the poem and its background information (President Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War) as well as its historical context (World War I). During the lesson, students will also practice determining the meaning of unfamiliar words in the poem.

Type: Lesson Plan

Explore the famous speech “All the World’s a Stage” from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. In this interactive tutorial, you’ll analyze how connotation and imagery develop a character's perspective. 

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore the famous speech “All the World’s a Stage” from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. In this interactive tutorial, you’ll analyze an extended metaphor within the speech and how it contributes to the speech’s meaning.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Continue to explore references to sight in the first chapter of Edward Bloor's novel Tangerine and how they convey different meanings and reveal information about characters. 

This interactive tutorial is part 2 of 2. Click HERE to launch Part One.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore the difference between vision and perception and how words related to sight convey different meanings and reveal information about characters in the first chapter of Edward Bloor's novel Tangerine.

This interactive tutorial is part 1 of 2. Click HERE to launch Part Two.

In Part Two, you'll continue to examine references to sight in the first chapter of Tangerine. You'll examine how these references convey different meanings and reveal information about characters.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Explore the poem “The Railway Train” by Emily Dickinson in this interactive tutorial. Learn about personification and vivid descriptions and determine how they contribute to the meaning of a poem. 

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Learn about dramatic irony and its impact within a story. In this interactive tutorial, you'll read excerpts of a story about Abraham the circus elephant. You'll read about Abraham's unexpected adventure as you examine the effects of dramatic irony within the text.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Learn about two types of figurative language—similes and metaphors—in this interactive tutorial. You'll read several classic poems, including "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost and "Hope" by Emily Dickinson. You'll examine how each poem uses metaphor to convey a specific idea to readers.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Learn about different kinds of story structures that authors use in this interactive tutorial. You'll examine several types of story structures, including linear and nonlinear structures, as well as open and closed story structures. You'll practice identifying the various features of these different structures.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

The goal of the exemplar from Student Achievement Partner web resources is to give students practice in reading and writing about poetry. The poem makes connections to World War I as students closely analyze the poet's depiction of war. Students explore complex text through a) re-reading, paraphrasing, and discussing ideas, (b) achieving an accurate basic understanding of the stanzas of the poem, (c) achieving an accurate interpretive understanding of the piece, and (d) building a coherent piece of writing that both constructs and communicates solid understanding of the poem.

Type: Teaching Idea

This resource from Teaching Tolerance focuses on Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise." It begins with a discussion of figurative language and the power of words and moves into a discussion of overcoming hardships.

Type: Teaching Idea

"Explore reading strategies using the think-aloud process as students investigate connections between the life and writings of Edgar Allan Poe. The unit, which begins with an in-depth exploration of "The Raven," then moves students from a full-class reading of the poem to small-group readings of Poe's short stories ("The Black Cat," "Hop-Frog," "Masque of the Red Death," and "The Fall of the House of Usher"). The unit concludes with individual projects that explore the readings in more detail. Students have the opportunity to choose among the following [three] activities: write a narrative in Poe's style; design a sales brochure for the House of Usher; ...or investigate the author further by exploring biographical and background information in more detail. The lesson includes options for both students who need direct instruction and those who can explore with less structure."

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence