Describes a writing assignment based on a teacher-created scenario in which students discover a box (when visiting their grandmother's sister) containing a number of strange items including a written proposal for marriage. (TB)

Lists 24 writing lesson plans or teaching approaches designed to keep students engaged toward the end of the school year, including list making, ABC stories, fractured fairy tales, cut word stories, "bummer behavior" letter writing, and using children's books as a stimulus. (TB)

Topics, materials, and assignments are provided for 94 literature lessons for eighth grade. Subject matter includes Russian literature, 18th century literature, and individual authors such as Moliere, Pushkin, and Byron. (ND)

Topics, materials, and assignments are provided for 123 literature lessons for ninth grade. Subject matter includes Second Period of Russian Liberation Movement, Ostrovskii, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Balzac. (ND)

The borders that separate and connect different cultures often come into sharpest relief when the focus is on themes and motifs found in the literature or the visual arts of several lands. With the Internet, students can discover such points of intercultural contact for themselves, crossing borders that can lead them to a broader perspective on…

Describes ideas for writing prompts and assignments proposed by three different teachers: (1) writing poems inspired by smells of herbs and spices; (2) writing about past perceptions and feelings after looking at a photograph; and (3) writing a "self-portrait." (TB)

Offers an exercise to help students understand the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing and how both practices can result in plagiarism if the original source is not cited. Explains how the exercise uses Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address." (TB)

While a single lesson plan cannot fully explore the variety and complexity of African life, in this lesson students can gain insight into the lives of some black women in Sub-Saharan Africa by adopting a perspective that is in part traditional, based on the arts of African village life, and in part postcolonial, based on the work of African women…

Presents a class activity which uses laminated pictures from art calendars, museums, and other sources as a stimulus for writing. (SR)

Describes a writing assignment based on a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode in which an alien sacrifices his life so two cultures can come together. Provides questions for students to answer during the viewing of the episode. Suggests a writing assignment (and several variations) in which students create their own alien. (TB)

Topics, materials, and assignments are provided for 49 literature lessons for tenth grade, plus review notes. Subject matter includes Gorky, Mayakovsky, Soviet literature in the 1920s, the 1930s, Tolstoi, the Great Patriotic War, Sholokhov, and modern foreign literature. (ND)

Presents three short essays designed to stimulate teachers in their approaches to teaching literature and writing as the school year draws to a close. (TB)

Shows how a writing exercise requiring students to write to themselves five years into the future has a dramatic effect on them and helps them, perhaps for the first time, to think about their futures. (TB)

Describes two writing assignments that may be used to make Shakespeare more approachable and understandable: first a paraphrase of a passage, and second a memo to an actor interpreting the same passage. (TB)

Based on characters in the Arthurian legend, this lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand that many writers have told the tale of King Arthur and the people around him, including Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and Mordred. The main activity of the lesson involves students writing a dramatic monologue supposedly composed…