The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Twelfth Night" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.
The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Twelfth Night" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.
The corrupting influence of slavery on marriage and the family is a predominant theme in Solomon Northup's narrative Twelve Years a Slave. In this lesson, students are asked to identify and analyze narrative passages that provide evidence for how slavery undermined and perverted these social institutions. Northup collaborated with a white ghostwriter, David Wilson. Students will read the preface and identify and analyze statements Wilson makes to prove the narrative is true.
In this lesson, students will examine a preselected set of newspaper articles drawn from the "Chronicling America" website. They will determine the right each article illustrates and the responsibility that comes with that right.
Expose middle school students to a first taste of Shakespeare from the angle of the ghost story and launch into the subject of verbs. In this lesson, they learn how Shakespeare uses verbs to move the action of the play. Students then distinguish generic verbs from vivid verbs by working with selected lines in Hamlet's Ghost scene. Finally they test their knowledge of verbs through a crossword interactive puzzle.
Clues to Walt Whitman's effort to create a new and distinctly American form of verse may be found in his Notebooks, now available online from the American Memory Collection. In an entry to be examined in this lesson, Whitman indicated that he wanted his poetry to explore important ideas of a universal scope (as in the European tradition), but in authentic American situations and settings using specific details with direct appeal to the senses.
In this lesson, students explore the historical context of Walt Whitman's concept of "democratic poetry" by reading his poetry and prose and by examining daguerreotypes taken circa 1850. Next, students will compare the poetic concepts and techniques behind Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," and have an opportunity to apply similar concepts and techniques in creating a poem from their own experience.
This collection uses primary sources to explore The Watsons Go To Birmingham1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.
What's in the Bag? invites primary students to play with vocabulary common to their environment.
Professor Kate Rushin describes the Harlem Renaissance as a large social and cultural movement fueled by many factors in this video from A Walk Through Harlem.
Past meets present in this lesson in which students practice verb tense when they write personal short stories that they then publish in a flip book.
Students will watch a video of a storyteller coming up with a rap that tells a story. They will identify story elements (who, what, and where), and record significant details. The next lesson plan ,Using Story Elements to Write a Rap, has students creating their own rap with the story elements.
Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury is often referred to as William Faulkner's first work of genius. Faulkner's style is characterized by frequent time shifts, narrator shifts, unconventional punctuation and sentence structure, as well as a stream-of-consciousness technique that reveals the inner thoughts of characters to the reader. This curriculum unit will examine narrative structure and time, narrative voice/point of view, and symbolism throughout The Sound and the Fury.
William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a novel that engages middle school students in thought-provoking discussion, and provides practice in literary analysis skills. The three lessons in this unit all stress textual evidence to support observations and generalizations uncovering the novel's central character traits, symbols and themes.
This collection uses primary sources to explore Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.
Set in the Dominican Republic during the rule of Rafael Trujillo, In the Time of the Butterflies fictionalizes historical figures in order to dramatize the Dominican people's heroic efforts to overthrow this dictator's brutal regime. In the following activities, students will examine the actions of the characters in the novel and discuss an all encompassing definition for courage.
This online activity helps students recognize word patterns by having them sort a series of words into short-vowel word families.
Since 1995, Rhode Islanders have come together each February to read and celebrate the life of one of America's finest poets and writers, Langston Hughes (1902-1967). Made possible through a grant from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the annual Langston Hughes Poetry Reading is a shining example of what public humanities can pass on to communities far and wide. In addition to videos of readings given by participants at the annual event, this page includes resources and related materials for teaching about Langston Hughes.
"This semester, we will read writing about travel and place from Columbus's Diario through the present. Travel writing has some special features that will shape both the content and the work for this subject: reflecting the point of view, narrative choices, and style of individuals, it also responds to the pressures of a real world only marginally under their control. Whether the traveler is a curious tourist, the leader of a national expedition, or a starving, half-naked survivor, the encounter with place shapes what travel writing can be. Accordingly, we will pay attention not only to narrative texts but to maps, objects, archives, and facts of various kinds. Our materials are organized around three regions: North America, Africa and the Atlantic world, the Arctic and Antarctic. The historical scope of these readings will allow us to know something not only about the experiences and writing strategies of individual travelers, but about the progressive integration of these regions into global economic, political, and knowledge systems. Whether we are looking at the production of an Inuit film for global audiences, or the mapping of a route across the North American continent by water, these materials do more than simply record or narrate experiences and territories: they also participate in shaping the world and what it means to us. Authors will include Olaudah Equiano, Caryl Philips, Claude L?vi-Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Jamaica Kincaid, William Least Heat Moon, Louise Erdrich, ?lvar N
Explore the traditions and conventions of haiku and compare this classic form of Japanese poetry to a related genre of Japanese visual art.