This lesson remixes a lesson entitled Teach Design: Portkey (developed by Austin Meyer) by employing it as an anticipatory activity for an instructional unit on Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." Students follow the steps outlined in the original lesson and then return back to this activity frequently during their reading of the unit text in order to deepen their understanding of the unit text and to reinforce the author's message concerning the power of stories in our lives.

Students will demonstrate oral communication and literacy skills by telling and retelling stories with creative dramatics. Students will apply a creative process for music, and improvise with movement and music to enhance a short story or poem.

This lesson remixes an original lesson created by Susan Ketcham entitled "The Poetry of Maya Angelou." In this lesson, students expand on a classroom activity (discussion question number 4) from the original source lesson and will use that as a foundation for learning and preparing for their own oral recitation of a poem. In order to successfully complete this task, students will need to explore one poem for both literal and figurative meaning and then determine how that poem would sound if spoken aloud. This last step requires students to critically explore how oral techniques such as tone, pauses, shifts, etc. help develop meaning.

After reviewing tips for following instructions, students will use plane figures to create a mystery image using their teacher's algorithm. Unfortunately, the teacher's directions are not very precise. Students will lend a hand by giving detailed feedback to debug and clarify the set of ordered instructions to successfully build a snowman.