What’s In This Month’s English Teacher Fun Box?

English Teacher Fun Box is a carefully curated collection of timely lessons and resources, designed to engage your students based on what's relevant and trending during any given month. You’ll have everything you need to make teaching exciting, impactful, and deeply connected to the world your students live in.

• MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU! Teach Argument With Star Wars! -- May fourth falls on a Sunday this year... so perhaps we should go with "Revenge of the Fifth"...? This fun lesson asks students to closely read and analyze a variety of iconic phrases from the Star Wars franchise. Even better, the core lesson is best implemented as an interactive "Quiz, Quiz, Trade" style activity that gets students up and moving around, discussing with partners, and collaboratively digging into the text. 

• Teach Argument With Mother's Day! -- Mother's Day falls on May 11th this year. This lesson bundle uses Maya Angelou's famous poem, "Mother: A Cradle To Hold Me" as the central text for close reading and rhetorical analysis. Students will have the opportunity to engage in a comprehensive guided analysis before doing their own close reading of Taylor Swift's "The Best Day" (another "Mother's Day" classic!). This bundle culminates with an opportunity for comparative analysis and synthesis, which makes it a lovely touch in the days leading up to the AP Lang exam, too!
   
• Teach Argument With Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address -- Graduation season is upon is, and lucky for us, there is no shortage of incredible commencement speeches that are just begging to be analyzed by our students. Steve Jobs' iconic address to the Stanford graduating class of 2005 is a classic example -- as Jobs uses storytelling as the driving force behind this rhetorical work of art. This bundle includes a comprehensive close reading that spans the entire speech (nearly 30 pages!!), so you have the flexibility to use this as a deep-dive for students to engage with individually or in small groups... as a chunked-lesson that spans one or two weeks... or even as a jig-saw'ed lesson as groups take on different parts of the argument.
   
• Teach Argument With Commencement Speeches -- Analyzing the Steve Jobs commencement address is a great way to introduce students to the genre, and to prime them for unpacking additional commencement speeches on their own. This bundle serves as a lovely companion to the above lesson (42 pages!!) -- it includes five different iconic commencement speeches, formatted for close reading and rhetorical analysis, but without the guiding questions that hold students' hands through the analytical process. This is a great way to offer students choice, to "jigsaw" the class's analysis of the commencement speech genre, and to engage students with complex, compelling texts. The bundle culminates with an essay task that asks students to synthesize any two speeches, bringing together what they've learned. (Love this!)
  

Wondering What Was In April's English Teacher Fun Box?

• Teach Argument on April Fool’s With Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” — This is one of those lessons that's fun to teach year-round, but what better way to celebrate April Fool’s than with Jonathan Swift’s infamous satirical essay? (And maybe with a touch of modern satire from The Onion brought into the mix?) 

• Teach Argument With The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock for National Poetry Month — That’s right! April is National Poetry Month, and what an absolute joy it is to teach incredible works of poetry through the lens of argument and rhetorical analysis. This particular lesson bundle asks students to closely read, unpack, and rhetorically analyze T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock.” This extensive guided analysis culminates with a synthesis task that asks students to place Prufrock into conversation with Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” — an awesome combination!

• Teach Argument With Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” — Complement your deep dive into “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with a close reading and rhetorical analysis of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.” The Prufrock bundle culminates with a synthesis task that connects the poem to Taylor Swift’s hit song, but the full “Anti-Hero” bundle ensures you can take the lesson even further. 

• Teach Argument With Langston Hughes and Amanda Gorman for National Poetry Month — Dig into even more wonderful poetry this National Poetry Month with Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again” and Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.” This lesson bundle offers a comprehensive guided rhetorical analysis of both texts, along with opportunities to compare, contrast, and synthesize these remarkable works. The culminating exercise asks students to weave a third argument into the mix: Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” Wow!

• Teach Argument With Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” — Complement your students’ analysis of “Let America Be America Again” and “The Hill We Climb” with this wildly popular lesson that centers around Childish Gambino’s hit song, “This Is America.” This offers a wonderful opportunity to extend the work of your students’ poetry analyses in a compelling, engaging, and relevant way!

• Teach Argument With Earth Day Speeches — Earth Day falls on April 22nd this year, and what better way to celebrate than with a close reading and rhetorical analysis of Gaylord Nelson’s first ever Earth Day address? This lesson offers a comprehensive guided analysis of Nelson’s 1970 speech, as well as Greta Thunberg’s 2019 address to the U.N. These are very powerful (and very different) arguments that center on the stuff of Earth Day! 

Wondering What Was In March's English Teacher Fun Box?

• Teach Complex Concepts (Like Thesis Statements) With March Madness — There’s a BETTER way to use tournament-style brackets to teach complex concepts and to achieve deeper learning. Try this once, and you'll be using it all year!

• Teach Argument With St. Patrick’s Day — This is a fun one! Students will receive a rainbow passport that corresponds to six different color-coded stations throughout the room, each one somehow connected to St. Patrick’s Day and Irish heritage. The surprise at the end of the rainbow? You guessed it. An awesome synthesis essay!

• Teach Argument With Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help” — Post Malone’s hit song, “I Had Some Help,” has been at the top of the charts for months. This bundle includes a guided close reading and opportunities for synthesis with similar arguments (e.g. “Before He Cheats”).

• Teach Argument With Bruno Mars & Lady Gaga’s “Die With a Smile” — This month, Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga’s “Die With a Smile” seems to be playing on every station, all of the time. Throughout the song, Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga pay homage to the famous duets of the 1970s, but with a modern twist. This bundle asks students to unpack the language in this popular text, and to synthesize it with comparable popular arguments that inspired its development.

• Teach Argument With Drake & Kendrick Lamar’s Diss Tracks — Wow. This bundle is the star of the show this month, spanning nearly 40 pages and absolutely packed with content that you can use to teach argument, close reading, and synthesis using the feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar all month. (You can, of course, scale it down to a day or two!) Lyrics have been carefully excerpted to provide much more classroom friendly avenue for teaching these powerful texts — so you can focus on close reading and rhetorical analysis without the language that might otherwise derail your lesson.

Wondering What Was In February's English Teacher Fun Box?

• Teach Argument With President Trump’s Second Inaugural Address — Access a comprehensive line-by-line analytical activity that prompts students to unpack the language of President Trump’s 1/20/25 inaugural address, with a laser-focus on language, close reading, and rhetorical analysis.

• Teach Argument with 2024 Super Bowl Commercials — In preparation for analyzing this rhetoric and compelling arguments that will surely be baked into this year’s Super Bowl commercials!

• Teach Argument with 2023 Super Bowl Commercials — An extended repertoire of recent Super Bowl commercials to analyze and consider alongside each other!

• Teach Argument with Love Letters — Close reading, rhetorical analysis, and comparative analysis of some of the most famous love letters in history… especially relevant with Valentine’s Day just around the corner! 

• Hopes & Dreams, Tropes & Schemes — A speed-dating style game that’s designed to foster students’ understanding of complex rhetorical devices in an engaging manner… A fun lesson year round, but especially fitting for Valentine’s Day

• Teach Argument with Taylor Swift’s Hit Song “Lover” — This English Teacher Fun Box would be incomplete without at least one popular love song to closely read, analyze, and unpack with students… and Taylor Swift’s hit song “Lover” lends itself wonderfully to this purpose! 

• **JUST ADDED!!** Teach Argument With 2025 Super Bowl Commercials — Bring the 2025 Super Bowl Commercials that just aired into your classes for an incredibly compelling, authentic, and meaningful way to teach close reading and rhetorical analysis!

Wondering What Was In January’s English Teacher Fun Box?

• A guided close reading of Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” This is a comprehensive lesson bundle that uses “A Bar Song,” one of 2024’s most celebrated songs, as a central text. Students will engage in close reading, guided rhetorical analysis, compare and contrast with poetry, synthesis with other pop songs, and even have the opportunity to develop their own arguments that achieve “lyrical dissonance” with the help of some AI tools. (This is SO good!)

• A guided close reading of Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things.” Similarly, this lesson bundle utilizes “Beautiful Things” as a core text — another extremely popular song of 2024. The argument in “Beautiful Things” lends itself to a deeper and more complex analysis, too.

• President Biden’s 2021 Inaugural Lesson Bundle. This is a doozy of a bundle, spanning 27 pages of guided close reading and rhetorical analysis, and including opportunities to analyze Amanda Gorman’s work. This is a wonderful way to prep students for the inauguration later this month.

• President Trump’s 2017 Inaugural Lesson Bundle. This is another lovely bundle that asks students to analyze and synthesize President Trump’s 2017 inauguration and inaugural address with that of previous inaugurations. What better way to pave the way to a comprehensive analysis on January 20th?

• The Flip Book: Guided Analysis! The Flip Book is a lovely interactive exercise that offers students a structured environment for engaging in rhetorical analysis on their own. This resource can be easily printed, assembled, and used as a compelling homework assignment as students begin to analyze the January 20th inauguration (or any argument, for that matter) on their own.

• Guided close reading and analysis of MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Students are asked to closely read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, while pausing to unpack key lines or to answer guiding questions along the way. This is a great way to give students an accessible means for digging into “I Have a Dream,” and for setting students up to dig even deeper into other similar texts!