American Literature Teacher Resources

Introduce your class to the writing of the indigenous Americans and, even more well known, their story telling. An engaging presentation describes what kinds of texts would be included in the oral stories performed and some common themes...

While reading Arthur Miller's The Crucible, start or end each day with a journal activity. The project includes a list of prompts for each act of the play. Pupils choose a prompt every time they write and connect their own experiences to...

Ninth graders analyze American literature from the antebellum era of Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this American literature lesson, 9th graders work in groups to read documents for the lesson....

Students prepare for and respond to literature selections. This package includes fourteen lessons from the American Literature, The Civil War and Its Aftermath: 1845-1880 series, each covering a different reading selection. Pre-reading...

Young scholars prepare for and respond to literature selections. This package includes nineteen lessons from the American Literature, A New Nation: 1750-1850 series, each covering a different reading selection. Pre-reading and response...

Students prepare for and respond to literature selections. This package includes eleven lessons from the American Literature, The Earliest Days: Prehistory to 1750 each covering a different reading selection. Pre-reading and response...

Students prepare for and respond to literature selections. This package includes twelve lessons from the American Literature, Regionalism and Realism: 1865-1910 series, each covering a different reading selection. Pre-reading and...

Eleventh graders explore works of the Lost Generation writers of the 1920's. In this American literature lesson plan, 11th graders analyze provided selections from Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and then respond to a writing...

Students read a collection of stories and watch videos to learn about the Jewish assimilation in American literature. In this American literature lesson plan, students watch videos about Judaism, read stories from a contemporary Jewish...

Use this presentation about Thomas Paine's The American Crisis series to guide any number of assignments. The slides provide instructions for a literary terms assignment, an open response journal entry, two research writing projects, and...

The Great Gatsby has become one of the most iconic novels in American literature. An eBook allows readers to access the full text of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. With the original words and paragraph breaks intact, new generations...

The words of Henry David Thoreau on Civil Disobedience seem particularly relevant today, as are his writings and those of other transcendental thinkers who ask what it mean to live deliberately and what are the responsibilities of...

Learners explore American literature authors. In this literature lesson, students review American literature authors and their main works.  Learners then complete a worksheet matching the authors to their works.

I love Faulkner, his experimental style and stream of consciousness are so exciting. Your learners can analyze William Faulkner and his novel, The Sound and the Fury by defining his place in American literary history and exploring his...

How do transcendentalists believe you must learn about the world? Use this PowerPoint to define transcendentalism and explain reason and intuition. Social, political, and philosophical influences of this time are introduced, and a few...

This first in a series of four resources is designed for instructors to use Octavia E. Butler's Kindred in their classes. The packet includes an overview of the unit, a day-to-day calendar, links to background articles, and reading...

Bring multi-cultural experiences and literature into your language arts class with this instructional activity. Here, young readers explore the points of view of first and second-generation Asian immigrants with a list of various fiction...

Tenth graders read examples of writings by women authors showing their dissent. After completion of their reading, they brainstorm on why they believe female authors have criticized society. In groups, they use the Internet to research...

Students are introduced to the ideas of the American Dream at the turn of the century. They present their ideas on the American Dream at the turn of the century through a person characterized in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.

Students form groups to help each other read, analyze, and conduct research on important background information about Jews and their assimilation into modern American society. They write their own stories of assimilation.

Eleventh graders ponder about what it means to be an "American." They discuss the impact of an author's word choice and sentence structure on text. They identify some major themes and development of the Letters... Compose paragraphs and...

A simple, standard, reading comprehension quiz for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. High schoolers answer multiple choice questions that test their ability to recall information about the plot and characters from Mark Twain's novel....

A standard reading comprehension quiz, this resource asks 10 multiple choice questions that focus on the characters in Harper Lee's modern classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The fact-based questions, which focus on identifying...

What do Roger Chillingworth, Dr. Heidegger, and Ethan Brand have in common? They are all American literature poster boys for Romanticism, advertising the dangers of valuing reason over feeling and intuition. Introduce your class to...