ELA Guidebooks is an English language arts curriculum for core instruction. Made by teachers for teachers, the guidebook units ensure all students can read, understand, and express their understanding of complex, grade-level texts, ensuring their readiness for college or a career. Each text collection has a shared idea and contains authentic texts…

This article outlines four different views of ELA's economic mission. It also presents a classroom activity in which students (a) evaluate the four views and (b) advocate for their own ideas about ELA and economics.

How do English teachers, with their amazing gift, empower students to see and experience literature not as a burden that must be endured and memorized for the test and then mercifully forgotten, but as a vehicle for self-discovery and reflection? One effective way to help students experience and discover literature is through the characters. For…

In the English language arts classroom, social justice is a way to increase students' abilities to articulate their experiences, critique their world, and address those identified issues with subsequent action. Teachers who practice social justice education cultivate student voice through class activities, readings, assignments, and assessments…

This research examines differential participation in three specific classroom literacy activities over an academic school and their relationship to progress on school-based measures of literacy progress in one urban kindergarten linguistically diverse classroom. Exploring the experiences of three kindergarten beginning English language learners…

The authors, former middle and high school English teachers, review the rationale for using humor and fun in the classroom and provide detailed descriptions for teaching practices and activities that confer enjoyment and learning for language arts students. Although fun activities, these methods foster vocabulary development, grammar instruction,…

With daily classroom schedules jammed with many concepts and skills to cover, integrating subjects whenever possible offers some relief. Primary classrooms can use their daily calendar time to integrate language arts and math. This teaching approach includes the use of word walls, interactive writing, journaling, and other effective teaching…

Offers brief descriptions from seven English teachers of how and for what purpose they have used an unusual film in their English classroom. (SR)

The text samples presented in this document primarily serve to exemplify the level of complexity and quality that the Standards require all students in a given grade band to engage with. Additionally, they are suggestive of the breadth of texts that students should encounter in the text types required by the Standards. The choices should serve as…

Presents nine short pieces written by teachers describing how they relate the visual arts to language learning in their classrooms. (SR)

Describes a writing assignment in which students read only the first two paragraphs of Charles Dickens's novel "A Tale of Two Cities" and then, after some brainstorming and prewriting, write a paragraph or two modeled on those, explaining the confusion and turmoil of the present day. Notes how Dickens's expressions become more familiar…

Discusses a five-day Holocaust lesson based around Robert O. Fisch's memoir "Light from the Yellow Star: A Lesson of Love from the Holocaust." Describes class activities as students responded to Fisch's artwork, to his narrative text, living history, living prejudice, and genocide. Concludes that the memoir is an invaluable testimony and…

Describes ways short story collections can be integrated into the English curriculum, including a short story fair, a short story hunt, using single short stories to extend a unit, using a short story by itself, using a collection as a whole, and using short stories as part of a focus on writing. Offers a list of short story resources. (SR)

Suggests resources, activities, and materials for use in teaching poetry, drama, and literature classes. (RB)

The ten lessons outlined in this document are based on articles from "The National Observer" used as sources of contemporary writing which varies in subject matter, length, and style. Lessons focus on reading comprehension, vocabulary development, composition, discussion and reasoning, primary and secondary sources, poetry writing,…