While offering a long list of questions involving verb conjugation, this activity would require teacher direction. Some of the instructions aren't clear. The 30 question review of verb usage would be a good review for middle school...

Elvira Woodruff's The Orphan of Ellis Island: A Time Travel Adventure is the core text in a interdisciplinary unit study of immigration at the turn of the century.

Students increase their skills in word attack, fluency, and spelling of words and research and find information on topics from the Internet. They then use the Quick Cam with the computer and will increase cooperative skills in small...

Students explore the derivations and usage of common slang terms. Through internet research and discussion, students consider the Latin and Greek roots of contemporary slang terms. Groups complete an etymology chart documenting their...

The oldest turtle ever recorded lived to the age of 188! As it turns out, two characters from Carl Hiaasen's Skink No Surrender are fascinated by these shelled creatures. Using the novel study, scholars research three types of...

Put on your pirate hat and get ready to teach r-controlled syllables. Learners practice using words that contain ar, or, er, ir, and ur. Instructors model how to decode words to isolate vowel teams, as well as combine r-controlled sounds...

The Bradys, the Flintstones, and the Simpsons are some of pop culture's most memorable families. So how do the Applewhites stack up? Using a novel study for Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan, scholars answer text-based...

With 52 task cards, learners will not run out of things to do with a book they are reading independently or with the class. Tasks include making a poster on a specific topic, writing a summary, drafting a sequel, creating a windsock,...

Games are great for practicing any number of basic skills. Here is a set of wonderful instructions for making a braille version of a spinning game, where children win points by correctly reading/identifying the high-frequency words the...

Statements can be taken out of context and interpreted or used to support a very different view than the one originally intended. Young journalists start thinking about leading questions, sentence structure, context, and how they all...

Blundering, audacious, obscurest. Class members develop strategies for teaching each other vocabulary words drawn from The Hobbit.

Readers take the main characters in Matilda and individually describe them through a mnemonic. To get there, group members create an acrostic poem describing the character they were given, and choose one of the words from the...

What's more important: privacy or convenience? Scholars consider the question as they take a digital privacy quiz and read a transcript of an NPR podcast about the privacy paradox. As a culminating activity, pupils develop a list of five...

Pick a corner. Scholars receive a quote about the Middle Ages and then participate in a four corners activity by choosing a corner pertaining to their quotes. They then work in groups of three to discuss the bold words in their quotes....

Caring, trustworthiness, and responsibility—these are only a few character traits in focus of a lesson based on stories from the Civil War era. Class members explore several influential lives while reading biographies that highlight...

Is it relevant? Scholars choose a resource from their folders and search for relevant information about the harmful and beneficial consequences of DDT. They mark benefits in one color and harmful effects with another color. They then add...

That's a double whammy! Scholars read the excerpt Double Whammy from The Exterminator. After identifying the gist of the text, they annotate by marking the author's claim. The group discusses what is meant by double whammy and...

Word processing practice and vocabulary blend with proofreading in a multi-purpose lesson that makes excellent use of an hour in the computer lab. Learners edit the grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors in a given paragraph (not...

Pupils review the fantasy of Alice in Wonderland and discuss the author. After reading the poem, "Jabberwocky," they look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Working as partners, they create a list of "protmanteau" or invented words...

If your beginning Spanish speakers familiarize themselves with the syllable combinations pa, pe, pi, po, and pu, they will have an easier time pronouncing unknown words that use the same syllables. Read the list of words provided here...

After a close reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" individuals copy the rhythm and rhyme scheme and rewrite the final stanzas of the poem.

As you read the list of words provided (on the second page), your learners attempt to discern which syllable combinations they heard for each word. They fill each blank with one of the following combinations: na, ne, ni, no, or nu. After...

After reading each chunk of two chapters of Carl Hiaasen's novel Hoot, ask learners to respond to related study questions. The instructions at the top of the questions suggest that individuals should read the questions first, read the...

As part of a final discussion of The House on Mango Street, groups examine a concept question about the text, record arguments for and opposed to the question, and then a draw their own conclusions.