Students discuss various ways families and communities pass down oral and visual art forms to younger generations. This multi-subject introductory lesson prepares students to create a project about their own families.

Students explore the role of the spiritual played during the period of slavery and the Civil War. They listen to and analyze various forms of spirituals They gain an awareness of how music reflects cultures and social issues.

Students examine pop culture of the 1980s.  In this historical time period lesson, students view a Smurfs cartoon from the 1980s and discuss its similarities and differences to cartoons today.  Students work in groups to...

Students discuss dance elements and create a dance map. They choose a dance theme and incorporate movement into their dance maps and choreography. They also experiment with different types of music.

Students define traditional music, describe distinguishing characteristics of traditional songs, and discover the connection between music and cultural heritage in this Music and Social Studies lesson for the fourth through tenth grades.

Students explore Walt Whitman and about poetry. Most importantly, it teach them that poetry is something anyone can write and encourage them to tell the story of their own community in verse

Students examine reasons that led people to explore, identify "West" as defined following Revolutionary War, explain importance of finding natural resources, develop time line of dates and events leading up to Lewis and Clark Expedition,...

Biographies can be a fun topic for any history project. Learners choose one famous person that lived between 1865 and 1930 to research. They gather information, work on reading comprehension, and use what they find to create slide shows...

What do Ben Franklin and Wolfgang Mozart have in common? Find out about the musical invention, the armonica or glassy-chord. Learners will read about how Ben Franklin invented this new instrument and how Wolfgang Mozart came to play it....

Middle schoolers practice evaluating art by creating a research project and presentation. They use the Internet and library to discover a piece of art or artist whom they feel has an impact on the world of art. Next, they create a...

Learners listen to Caribbean folk music and discuss maracas and their role in music. They construct and design pairs of maracas using paper mache, then perform a Puerto Rican folk song using their maracas.

Students discover the history of the United States by examining the Great Migration.  In this U.S. History lesson, students research the immigration movement on the Internet and complete a worksheet about the large population...

After a teacher-led demonstration on the lives and music of Aaron Copland and Duke Ellington, learners write a letter to them which shows their understanding of how a person's life experiences can be reflected in a composer's music. They...

Why do we read primary source documents? What can they give us that other writings cannot? Provide your learners with any of the primary sources attached here (there are seven), and have them complete the graphic organizer (which opens...

Engage your middle schoolers with Pastor Martin Niemoller's famous poem that begins, "First they came for the communists." Now that you have their attention, send learners to the various work stations you created to have them explore...

Students explore how different holiday traditions are celebrated around the world. Scholars write a paper describing how they celebrate their own favorite holiday. Email partners, from different states and countries, share their...

Students study about the Civil War through primary sources used in the PBS production of "Freedom: A History of US" based on Joy Hakim's books, "A History of US", and the companion PBS Web site.

Students explore Bebop in America by listening to music and answering questions.

If you can find the book Caps for Sale in the target foreign language, this is a great activity to accompany it! After reading and modeling the story, the teacher models a dialogue that would take place between a salesman and a...

Young scholars conduct research in order to create an understanding of The Eerie Canal and its place in history and the world. students use a variety of primary and secondary resources to aid in the research process.

Students identify musical characteristics of blues music and define the term 'scale.' They identify chromatic, major, pentatonic, and blues scales and label each key on a keyboard using letter names, sharps and flats.

Students take a pre-test to show their prior knowledge of dinosaurs. Using the internet, they reasearch the time period in which they roamed the Earth. Focusing on the area of Connecticut, they compare and contrast the large and small...

Students explore Puerto Rico.  In this Puerto Rico current events lesson, students conduct a Webquest to answer questions about Puerto Rico's culture.  Students discuss whether Puerto Rico is a country or a state, and defend...