Curated OER
Splendide Californie French Artists’ Impressionsof the Golden State, 1786-1900
There is a lot to learn from art. This teacher's guide provides you with extensive background information, activities, and a scripted commentary to accompany a slide show on French artists in California during the Gold Rush Period. The...
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Ad lit.org: Discussion Guide: The Fabled Fourth Graders of Aesop Elementary School
Candace Fleming writes contemporary stories built around Aesop's fables in The Fabled Fourth Graders of Aesop Elementary School. No one wants to teach the fourth graders until the amazing Mr. Jupiter comes along. He undertakes the task...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: If I Stay by Gayle Forman
Seventeen-year-old Mia has no memory of the accident; but in a blink, she finds herself watching as her own damaged body is taken from the wreck
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: In My Hands by Irene Gut Opdyke
In the fall of 1939 the Nazis invaded Irene Gut's beloved Poland, ending her training as a nurse and thrusting the sixteen-year-old Catholic girl into a world of degradation that somehow gave her the strength to accomplish what amounted...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Now You See Her by Jacquelyn Mitchard
Hope Shay's life is about acting. Her parents have supported and promoted her talents since she was a little girl. From community theater, dinner theater, and commercials to auditions around the country and finally a place at a...
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Ad lit.org: Discussion Guide: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by James Boyne
Bruno is only nine years old when his father, a commandant in Hitler's army, is transferred from Berlin to Auschwitz during the Holocaust. The house at "Out-With," as Bruno calls it, is small, dark, and strange. He spends long days...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
Stargirl Caraway explores her new neighborhood with an eye for the unusual. She notices the agoraphobic neighbor, the seemingly homeless young boy, and others who do not fit in easily. Stargirl, never one with an inclination to conform,...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli
Young Misha Pilsudski lives on the streets of Warsaw, Poland and struggles with his identity. When he enters the Jewish ghetto and sees firsthand the evil acts of Hitler's Nazi soldiers, he realizes it's safest of all to be nobody.
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
One glance and students know that the new girl at Mica High School is not your ordinary high school student. Stargirl Caraway is a free spirit. She has a pet rat named Cinnamon, plays the ukulele in the cafeteria, and refuses to wear the...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Looking for Alaska by John Green
Everybody has a talent. Miles Halter's is knowing the last words of a lot of different people - people like the author Rabelais, whose enigmatic last words "I go to seek a Great Perhaps" inspire the sixteen-year-old to leave his family...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Paper Towns by John Green
Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life - dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
In the suburbs of Chicago, two teens named Will Grayson - one gay, one straight - have lived their lives completely unaware of the other's existence. But that changes one fateful night when their worlds collide. Their lives begin to...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: The Sacrifice by Kathleen Benner Duble
In the year 1692, life changes forever for ten-year-old Abigail Faulkner and her family. In Salem, Massachusetts, witches have been found, and widespread fear and panic reign mere miles from Abigail's home of Andover. When two girls are...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson
This historical fiction book, winner of a 2006 Newbery Honor for children's books, is perfect for girls graduating from the Little House on the Prairie series. Author Kirby Larson based this tale on her own great-grandmother's...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Under a War Torn Sky by l.m. Elliott
Just nineteen years old, Henry Forester is the youngest pilot in his Air Force squadron. Still, he's one of their best fliers, facing Hitler's Luftwaffe in the war-torn skies above France. But when his plane is shot down on a mission...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Ever since she called 911 from a teen party, Melinda has quieted her voice, literally and figuratively. She only finds it when its needed to prevent a reoccurrence of the same horror. This stunning look at sexual assault and peer...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Hello, America by Livia Bitton Jackson
Eighteen-year-old Elli has a number tattooed onto her arm. It is an indelible remnant of a terrifying past a life lived, for many years, in the death camp of Auschwitz. When Elli arrives in New York City, she can not speak English, and...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
Set in 1943 when the Nazis occupied Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen is asked to carry out a heroic deed and aid her uncle in his efforts to smuggle Danish Jews across the sea to Sweden, where they will be safe. She has already...
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Ad lit.org: Guide: Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam and the Science of Ocean Motion
Part of Houghton Mifflin's excellent Scientists in the Field series Tracking Trash introduces Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a "trash tracker", who studies where trash goes when it is "spilled" in the ocean, to determine the direction of ocean...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
Liesel Meminger is only nine years old when she is taken to live with a foster family, the Hubermanns, on Himmel Street in Molching, Germany, in the late 1930s. She arrives with few possessions, but among them is The Grave Digger's...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Cures for Heartbreak by Margo Rabb
In Cures for Heartbreak, Margo Rabb writes a fictional account of a 15-year old girl whose mother dies just days after being diagnosed with melanoma; then her father falls ill, too. Using vignettes - many appeared elsewhere as short...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Arguably Mark Twain's most famous novel - indeed, one of the greatest works of American literature - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn brings together two people from the lower rungs of society, an ill-educated boy escaping an abusive...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Tweak by Nic Sheff
Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age 11. In the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. Even so, he felt like he would always be able to quit...
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Ad lit.org: Reading Discussion Guide: Sold by Patricia Mc Cormick
Thirteen-year old Lakshmi thinks she is leaving her poor rural family to go to the city to become a maid. Little does she know her family has sold her into prostitution, and the price for her freedom may be too high. This National Book...