Students put their heads together in a poetry circle to learn and practice different forms of poetry.

Working in small groups, students compose found and parallel poems based on a descriptive passage they have chosen from a piece of literature they are reading.

Students will examine architectural structures in paintings and how they are used, also considering the art elements, composition, emphasis, color, and light. They will also study the relationship between the built environment and nature in the paintings. Students then complete activities in which they select words and phrases to describe a painting's mood and write related poetry. Then they create drawings and write related poetry. As an optional activity, students may construct their own "camera obscura" and create a drawing.

Students will examine works of art that incorporate Asian export objects, and then respond to them using Japanese haiku poems.

Students deepen and refine their understanding of prepositions by reading Ruth Heller's Behind the Mask. They write preposition poetry and create a study guide using an online tool.

Students will discuss works of art that have grotesque elements and symmetry in their design. They will identify symmetry and line in grotesques. Students will create symmetrical designs for a pilgrim bottle and also design a door panel using grotesques. They will then analyze William Blake's poem "The Tiger" and write their own grotesque-inspired poetry.

In this lesson, athletics, aesthetics, and poetics intersect in new ways as developing literacy learners experiment together with the forms of language.

Too many of our teenagers were not read to when they were little and therefore have no nostalgic attachment to nor any interest in reading now. Simply telling them that reading is important to their success will not help these students form the socio-emotional connections to literature they did not make when they were younger. We have to give them the skills to make comprehension and complex literary analysis more gratifying than the mindless consumption of whatever easy entertainment their televisions and computers offer. If we can get them to need stories, and poems, and essays in the same way they seem to need the applications on their cell phones, then we can restore what was lost to the distractions, shortcomings, and traumas of their less than perfect childhoods. To do so, we must make reading feel fun and meaningful again (or for the first time) – rather than something that tortures our students and exposes their ignorance. This unit offers a multicultural exploration of the classic folktale “Little Red Riding Hood” as a path toward nurturing the bonds that literature creates between people and communities, giving us a sense of security, belonging, and purpose.

If words are creativity, then they are art. This is where the discipline of creative writing comes in, as well as that of screenwriting and therefore film-making. The two forms of media, while wholly different, are inextricably linked by that foundational, historic art form – storytelling. In a modern educational landscape where screen is preferred to page, it may be advantageous to stress the importance of both. There are lessons we can get from reading words that no screen will show us; as there are artistic things that can be done with images that could never be accomplished on the page. It is imperative, therefore, to make it clear for students that it is not better to see the movie, but to see the movie too . The simultaneous study of original, written story and its film adaptation can be a powerful learning tool, especially when the film in question is a vast re-imagining, paying concrete due to the original classic story while updating it for the modern imagination and culture. This curricular unit explores this consideration for several classic stories and their modern, reimagined film counterparts, with the intention of allowing students to apply their study of adaptation to their own independent reading.

The Riddle Interactive outlines the characteristics of riddle poems and provides direct instruction on the prewriting and drafting process for writing original riddle poems.

This activity is designed to help students reflect on the role of revision in the composition process. Designed for an end-of-semester portfolio project for a high school Creative Writing course, it could be easily adapted to be used in any classroom setting in which students have been expected to write and revise an original work.

Jonathan Swift's 1729 pamphlet "A Modest Proposal" is a model for satirizing social problems. In this lesson, students complete multiple readings of Swift's essay: a guided reading with the teacher, a collaborative reading with a peer, and an independent reading. The online Notetaker tool helps students restate key ideas from Swift's essay as they read and elaborate upon these ideas postreading. After independent reading, pairs of students develop a mock television newscast or editorial script, like those found on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update," The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report, including appropriate visual images in PowerPoint.

Students generate new vocabulary by discussing descriptive words, or adjectives, and the names of shapes they see in a still life painting. Inspired by an object in the painting, students then use their new vocabulary to create a shape poem.

Students will plan and design a still life composition. When composing the still life, students will choose objects that emphasize a variety of shapes and textures, and arrange the objects to reflect balance. Next students will create a photographic still life and use it as inspiration to write a poem. Then students will present the still life photograph and poem to the class.

Students will discuss a narrative work of art in order to interpret and understand the theme from the "Open Court" unit on "Risks and Consequences." Students imagine the events occurring before and after a narrative scene, sketch their ideas, then write a story describing the action and publish their story and illustrations in a book. The works of art and sketches provide a focus to practice writing three-part stories with dialogue and using adjectives and prepositions.

Melanie Abrams' novel, Playing, arrived from Grove/Atlantic in April 2008, and has been acquired for translation in three different languages. Here, she reads a section from her debut novel. She currently teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley. (29 minutes)

Vikram Chandra has won many awards and critical acclaim for his novels and short stories. The best selling Sacred Games was published in 2007. Born in New Dehli, he now teaches creative writing at Berkeley. He reads from his most recent novel to an audience at UC Berkeley. (57 minutes)

Stories and poems that have a familiar structure can create a supportive context for learning about the writing process, building students' background knowledge, and scaffolding their creation of original stories. In this lesson for students in second or late first grade, teachers help students explore the concepts of beginning, middle, and ending by reading a variety of stories and charting the events on storyboards. As they retell the stories, students are encouraged to make use of sequencing words (first, so, then, next, after that, finally). A read-aloud of Once Upon a Golden Apple by Jean Little and Maggie De Vries introduces a discussion of the choices made by an author in constructing a plot. Starting with prewriting questions and a storyboard, students construct original stories, progressing from shared writing to guided writing; independent writing is also encouraged.

In this unit I lead my Language Arts class through a reading of the classic American novel The Outsiders from a Critical Race Perspective (CRP). Starting with the introduction of the terminology associated with CRP, combined with discussions of some examples of institutionalized inequality in our country, I challenge students to look at the novel from a more critical, and fair minded point of view. In order to help students see the relevance of the novel in today’s world, I will lead them through an examination of some of the unfair and often brutal histories of “outsiders” in our country beginning with the dissemination of hundreds of Native American tribes, the sterilization of thousands during the eugenics craze, and the crisis on our southern border in which thousands have been labeled “outsiders” as others have for centuries. Through discussions, journal writing and projects meant to prompt empathy and understanding in my students, this unit will attempt to bring a new interpretation of The Outsiders to light.