Bring the vocabulary of film to life through the processes of filmmaking. Students learn terminology and techniques simultaneously as they plan, film, and edit a short video.

Students will be reading and writing myths. They will follow the structure of short stories and eventually publish their work.

Students form literature circles, read "Esperanza Rising" or "Becoming Naomi Leon" by Pam MuĐoz Ryan, use a Critical Thinking Map to discuss social issues, and use a class wiki.

Musical Overtones is a four-week unit that connects music and history. Students research musical styles as it relates to the other arts and science. Students select a musician and analyze his or her work and its impact on history. A discussion of this impact is presented in an open forum during instructional time.

Students kick off the unit with an analysis of images by engaging in a Four Corners activity, in which they begin to unpack the many positive and negative impacts of innovations on communication, infrastructure, and workers’ rights. After this initial analysis, students listen to oral histories, read narrative accounts, and study photos of people and places, to answer the question: How does innovation impact communities in Washington? Throughout the unit, students research a transformative innovation in workers rights, communication, and infrastructure in order to create a thought-provoking photo essay about how their chosen innovation impacts people and places in Washington.

In this lesson students will practice visualizing and understanding that visualization is an important comprehension strategy. Students will share their visualization of the story through original artwork.

This unit is focused on the examination of a single topic, in this case, the Native Americans of the inland Northwest and conflict that arose when other non-native people started to settle in the northwest, and to specifically address the native populations that lived in the inland northwest. The materials were created to be one coherent arc of instruction focused on one topic. The module was designed to include teaching notes that signal the kind of planning and thinking such instruction requires: close reading with complex text, and specific instructional strategies or protocols are described that support students’ reading and writing with evidence are described in enough detail to make it very clear what is required of students and how to support students in doing this rigorous work. Materials include summative assessment of content and process, central texts, key resources, and protocols that support and facilitate student learning.

Based on the Wyoming PBS program What’s in a Name, students will view episodes of the program to learn about how Wyoming towns got their names. In the introductory video Phil Roberts from the University of Wyoming introduces the PBS series entitled “Main Street Wyoming: What’s in a Name”. This introductory clip discusses how early explorers first named the rivers, streams, and mountain ranges and passes of Wyoming. Students will then work as a group to create a fictitious Wyoming town.

This "jigsaw" activity will give students the opportunity to work in groups to summarize a 1 to 2 page informational text. It "jigsaws" down to 1 class summary and can be done in 2 or 3 days. This plan was designed for a class of 22 students but can be easily modified by varying group size.