ELA Unit Planning Guide
This guide provides the framework and classroom resources to help you design an English Language Arts unit for middle or high school students centered around a book of your choosing.
Teach with Facing History ELA Learning Experiences
Each of our learning experiences provides activities and resources to explore a core Facing History concept or theme while building key literacy skills.
Teaching Strategies
Use our student-centered teaching strategies to strengthen your students’ literacy skills, nurture critical thinking, and build a respectful and collaborative classroom community.
Expressing Diversity in Jewish Identity: Blending In and Standing Out
This two-day lesson uses the story of Purim as a frame to examine how Jews have preserved and protected their identities and culture in dominant societies by choosing when to blend in and when to stand out.
Borders & Belonging
This modular ELA collection for grades 7–12 invites students to explore the complicated world of belonging and the tangible and intangible borders that shape it.
A Part and Apart: Inclusion and Exclusion in Our Jewish Communities
Students consider the benefits and challenges of identity labeling and their identity experiences within and outside their Jewish communities.
Gay Life Under Nazi Rule: The Legacy of Paragraph 175
Students watch survivor testimony from the documentary Paragraph 175 and engage in purposeful reflection about the survivors’ important stories.
Lost in Translation
Rapper Ruby Ibarra reflects on her Filipino-American experience and the role of language in a spoken-word poem.
Le Chambon: A Village Takes a Stand (en español)
Explore rescue during the Holocaust with the story of a community in Southern France that sheltered and hid thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.
Rose, Thorn, Bud Template
Students use this printable template to consider recent successes, challenges, and opportunities they experienced this week.
Compass Points
Students share what excites them about class, their needs and worries, and suggestions for making the the class a positive learning environment.