Historic New Orleans Collection
Exploring Primary Sources: Music in New Orleans
Looking for a new and exciting way to teach young historians the art of primary source analysis? Jazz up your lesson plan with a resource that asks class members to analyze photos, travel documents, and letters written by some of New...
Concordia University Chicago
The Pietá by Michelangelo Buonarroti
Why is arts education so important? It builds critical thinking, analysis and creative problem-solving skills. Learners review the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, and then analyze his piece, The Pieta. After that, they'll sculpt a human...
Curated OER
No Regrets: a Poetry Analysis
Young scholars read a poem and use the TPCASTT strategy for analysis. In this poetry analysis lesson, students journal about their future goals and read John Updike's "Ex-Basketball Player." Young scholars discuss the purpose of the poem...
Curated OER
Olympics and Politics: Let the Games Begin!
Let the games begin! Use political cartoons to analyze current events regarding the Olympic Games. This worksheet includes two cartoons depicting the 2008 Beijing Olympics, background information to help with analysis, and talking points...
Curated OER
Food and Dialect
The dialect words for types of food from across the British Isles get pupils thinking about native dialects and how they differ from Standard English. Class members create a dialect dictionary and discuss the difference between accent...
Curated OER
Whose History Is It Anyway? Patterns in History
Read and examine primary source material in order to analyze, synthesize, and debate information about the Great Depression. Critical analysts research various source materials related to the Great Depression. They work in teams to...
Novelinks
The Little Prince: Blooms’ Taxonomy Questions
Question what you read with a lesson based on Bloom's Taxonomy. As kids read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, they formulate questions with cues from a graphic organizer, and answer them to work on critical thinking skills.
Curated OER
Questioning Strategy for Les Miserables
After reading or watching the musical Les Miserables, challenge your high schoolers with these analysis questions. The sheet provided suggests having class members record the answers to these questions, but they would also be good...
Council for Economic Education
What's the Big Deal about Spices?
Today's gourmands don't consider spices to be the equivalent of silver and gold. During the middle ages, however, these commodities were precious. People back then used spices in religious ceremonies, to cure rotten food, and as a show...
Curated OER
Regarding the Fountain: Questioning Strategy—Cubing
Look deeper into the text with a reading strategy based on asking critical thinking questions. While reading Reading the Fountain by Kate Klise, learners think of questions that help them describe, compare, associate, analyze, apply, and...
EngageNY
Grade 9 ELA Module 1, Unit 1, Lesson 10
As you work through a literary analysis unit based on Karen Russell's "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," use a writing assessment to measure your class's skills. They choose one epigraph from the story to analyze and track...
EngageNY
Grade 10 ELA Module 1: Unit 1, Lesson 6
Wrap up your literary analysis unit with a discussion activity as tenth graders prepare for an end-of-unit assessment. After they have read and annotated Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepard to His Love," Sir Walter Raleigh's...
US National Archives
WWII: Western Europe 1939-45 – Resistance and SOE
Germany seemed to be unstoppable in the early years of World War II, but the tireless and sacrificial work of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) helped to steer the war in another direction. After exploring primary source documents,...
US National Archives
Eastern Europe 1939-45 — Berlin
The inevitability of World War II has arrived: Berlin has fallen. Young historians watch contemporaneous footage of the event, analyze primary source documents, and write a news report that details the roles of the Soviet, British,...
DocsTeach
Evaluating Perspectives on Westward Expansion
Although popular culture tells the story of the American West simplistically, its reality is far more complex. Native American tribes—while already on the land—didn't have the same interests, and conflicts between white settlers and...
K20 LEARN
You Think You Have Problems: Perspective in Multi-Genre Literature
Young scholars are asked to reflect on how personal experiences might influence points of view and perspectives. They read poems and biographies of the poets and then match the poem to the poet. To justify their matches, learners...
EngageNY
Grade 9 ELA Module 1, Unit 1, Lesson 14
Karen Russell's short story "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" has a unique structure that adds value to the story. With the fourteenth activity in a unit about literary analysis and textual support, analyze how Russell has...
Curated OER
Excerpt from Edward Bain's The History of Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835)
Great Britain was where the industrial revolution began. The class reads an excerpt from a document written in 1835 describing cotton manufacture in Great Britain. They then answer two critical analysis questions.
Curated OER
Center for Northwestern Art: Featured Objects
Each of the slides in this presentation provide learners with an image found at a northwestern art museum and a critical analysis of what can be seen in each piece. Learners can view this prior to a museum trip in order to build...
Curated OER
The Learning Network: Reactions to Rating Teachers
Meant to be used in connection with the article "In Teacher Ratings, Good Test Scores Are Sometimes Not Good Enough" also available on The New York Times website, this resource provides 12 short-answer writing prompts that ask both basic...
Curated OER
Why did the Aztec and Inca civilizations disappear?
Middle schoolers can analyze primary source documents to answer the question, "Why did the Aztec and Inca civilizations disappear?" They will read the provided excerpts then answer 11 different questions to uncover the ultimate answer.
Curated OER
Leaks and Gossip: Examining WikiLeaks Through Political Cartoons
Use political cartoons to spice up a discussion on national security! Two cartoons, one by Normal Rockwell in 1948, the other a parody of Rockwell's by Chuck Asay in 2010, depict the dangers of leaking information. Background information...
Curated OER
That Is Not My Opinion!
Being an informed citizen requires distinguishing fact from opinion and understanding persuasion methods. Secondary learners evaluate newspaper editorials. They read opinion pieces, identify the writer's purpose and position on an issue,...
Historical Thinking Matters
Social Security: 3 Day Lesson
What does social security reveal about the political and social culture of the 1930s? After beginning with a brief introductory video on the impact of the Great Depression and how various Americans, such as Huey Long and Francis...