The annual Elie Wiesel Writing and Visuals Arts Competition is open to students in grades 6 through 12 and serves to inspire middle and high school students and teachers to learn more about the Holocaust, racism, bigotry, and the dangers of prejudice. The questions posed each year guide students to explore the lessons of the Holocaust while examining contemporary issues such as bullying, peer pressure, unthinking obedience to authority, and indifference.

This source aims to help students place Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry in conversation with other poems and reading materials, and in doing so, the goal is to help students work on synthesizing sources. The paired passage assignments are designed to offer students and teachers flexibility in accomplishing these tasks. The source is a remix. The original lesson can be found here: https://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plans/gate-4-naomi-shihab-nye

This activity is intended as an introduction to close-reading using visual media. In this lesson, students will review and then closely "read" the painting, "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt in order to understand the process of close-reading and its impact on our understanding of texts. Once students have learned how to conduct close-reading of a visual text, they reflect on how they might transfer this skill to the written word.
This activity also includes optional extension activities that incorporate poetry into the lesson.

This activity is intended as an introduction to close-reading using visual media. In this lesson, students will review and then closely "read" the painting, "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt in order to understand the process of close-reading and its impact on our understanding of texts. Once students have learned how to conduct close-reading of a visual text, they reflect on how they might transfer this skill to the written word.
This activity also includes optional extension activities that incorporate poetry into the lesson.

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.

Adapted from Holzer, Madeline Fuchs (2016). “Every Day We Get More Illegal” by Juan Felipe Herrera. Retrieved from https://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plans/every-day-we-get-more-illegal-juan-felipe-herrera. 

A self-directed project aimed at getting students engaged with poetry on a variety of levels

This activity is inspired by by "The Pocket Instructor, Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Classroom" edited by Diana Fuss and William A. Gleason. In this lesson, students listen to multiple readings of Elizabeth Bishop's, "One Art." As a whole class, we conduct a line-by-line analysis of the poem in order to introduce and understand poetry analysis skills. The lesson culminates with a whole-class and individual reflection. An optional written analysis extension task is also provided.

This resource provides a simple, focused grading tool to assess literature analysis. It can be applied to demonstrations of skill through writing or speaking.

This resource is a remix of the EDSITEment! resource found through this link. That lesson does a strong job of placing Chinua Achebe's watershed novel within a particular cultural context. This resource aims to provide teachers and students with choices for comparative literature projects. This resource does not include activities so much as a list of resources that might pair well with a novel that is often difficult for high school students to grasp. 

A multi-day lesson designed to integrate Geography and Literacy in an integrated humanities, history, or English setting. 

This resource is designed as an end-of-unit choice assessment board for students. Although students are permitted to select from a variety of response options, the teacher can still control what each option includes, thus ensuring that the responses students generate meet the unit objectives.

As-is, this resource focuses on literary elements, compare/contrast, cause-and-effect, literary arguments, and rhetoric/persuasion using Gaston Leroux's "The Phantom of the Opera" as the paired text. However, this resource is easily adaptable to suit any text and/or instructional focus.

This resource is designed as an end-of-unit choice assessment board for students. Although students are permitted to select from a variety of response options, the teacher can still control what each option includes, thus ensuring that the responses students generate meet the unit objectives.

As-is, this resource focuses on literary elements, compare/contrast, cause-and-effect, literary arguments, and rhetoric/persuasion using Gaston Leroux's "The Phantom of the Opera" as the paired text. However, this resource is easily adaptable to suit any text and/or instructional focus.

This lesson uses Panic at the Disco's song, "Hey Look Ma, I Made It" to explore specific literary elements: metaphor, inversion, irony, and tone in order to consider how these devices help shape meaning. Students will work in pairs to employ close-reading skills for specific analytical tasks. They will reflect on their learning continuously throughout the lesson. The lesson will culminate with a brief analytical paragraph that asks them to consider how the figurative devices employed by the songwriters shapes meaning. Finally, they will reflect on the process of close-reading to consider how this process informed their understanding of the text and how they can transfer this skill to other analytical tasks.

This lesson uses Panic at the Disco's song, "Hey Look Ma, I Made It" to explore specific literary elements: metaphor, inversion, irony, and tone in order to consider how these devices help shape meaning. Students will work in pairs to employ close-reading skills for specific analytical tasks. They will reflect on their learning continuously throughout the lesson. The lesson will culminate with a brief analytical paragraph that asks them to consider how the figurative devices employed by the songwriters shapes meaning. Finally, they will reflect on the process of close-reading to consider how this process informed their understanding of the text and how they can transfer this skill to other analytical tasks.