With penetrating insight, Jhumpa Lahiri follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. The Big Read Reader's Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, timelines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American author.

Using Beloved as a model of a work with multiple narrative perspectives, students use a visualizing activity and close reading to consider ways in which subjective values shape contradictory representations.

Throughout this unit on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, students practice the same six skills with greater scaffolding and modeling at the beginning, and more independence toward the middle and end. The tasks include: 1. writing to an essential question to access background knowledge; 2. using context clues and root words to determine word meaning; 3. close reading with the aid of a glossary; 4. taking notes one of two graphic organizers (sequence of events and/or empathy map); 5. re-reading to answer text dependent questions; and 6. summarizing the chapter.

Detective Nate the Great searches San Francisco for a lost joke book. He discovers that the wrong place can be the best place to look for a lost item.

This lesson challenges students' views of Native Americans as a vanished people by asking them to compare their prior knowledge with information they gather while reading about contemporary Native Americans.

In this lesson students will complete guided notes while learning about the earth's seasons. Students will learn to describe the relationship between the tilt of Earth's axis and its yearly orbit around the sun.

This activity uses the song There was an Old Lady to help students understand probability.

At a New England prep school where keeping up appearances is everything, Tobias Wolff's youthful narrator learns the painful difference between truth and fiction. The Big Read Reader's Guide deepens your exploration with interviews, booklists, timelines, and historical information. We hope this guide and syllabus allow you to have fun with your students while introducing them to the work of a great American author.

Students create a soundtrack for a novel that they have read, as they engage in such traditional reading strategies as predicting, visualizing, and questioning.

This story is a folktale about a princess named Aziza who chooses her husband based on his answer to a math riddle. After traveling the kingdom, many suitors (a scholar, a merchant, and a soldier) try to answer her riddle but to no avail. A simple farmer is able to easily solve the riddle and that is who she chooses as her husband.

This expository nonfiction text is about how an oak tree may become vulnerable to disease from its bark being damaged by a bear clawing it.

Make connections across genres and across cultures to engage students in the study of literary voice and themes. Comprehension skills and vocabulary also come into play, especially for English language learners, as students read a novel and related poems, then write and perform original poems related to the novel.

Students apply think-aloud strategies to reading and to composition of artwork and poetry. They research symbols of peace as they prewrite, compose, and publish their poetry.

This realistic fiction story is about a young boy, Max, who is growing up on a large fruit farm in Chili and how he wants to find a friend in a faraway place

In this nonfiction selection, an Emperor penguin lays an egg in the bitter cold of Antarctica. The penguin parents battle the harsh environment to protect the egg and nurture the chick to maturity.

Pepita stops speaking Spanish because she is tired of being the neighborhood translator. However, when a disaster nearly occurs, Pepita realizes that speaking two languages is best.

Elizabeth was very determined to convince her parents to get her a pet. No matter what she did, her parents did not agree. Unexpectedly, she finds the perfect pet (a bug!) right under her nose, and her parents relent.

This excerpt from a biography explains how Pablo Picassos painting style changed over the twentieth century. It describes his Blue Period, Rose Period, and the period of Cubism.

Picture Match is a matching game that reinforces the concept of beginning-letter and short- and long-vowel sounds. .

Let the students be the vocabulary experts! Prior to whole class instruction, students create online flashcards and teach the class the new vocabulary.