Teach your class about the necessities of life using the book Tillena Lou's Day in the Sun. After a teacher-read-aloud, students make puppets depicting different plants and animals from the story and illustrating the habitat in...

What can maps tell us about the past? Find out with a Spanish lesson that incorporates geography. After examining maps individually, comparing two old maps of Spanish Florida and writing notes in the provided Venn diagram, pupils pair up...

Partners examine the family tree of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, a Spanish admiral and explorer who founded St. Augustine, Florida, and answer several questions about the text using a worksheet. After they've explored the family tree,...

After reading Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathmann, have your first graders differentiate between Gloria's actions and Officer Buckle's actions. Using a Venn diagram organizer, kids cut out various events from the story and...

Kids become global anthropologists as they explore commonalities and differences both in their classroom and expanding across the globe. Throughout several activities, learners conduct partner interviews that culminate in Venn diagrams,...

Finding common ground and building conversation can often prove a difficult task for many. Help learners build this important social skill using this resource, which includes a Venn diagram activity and sentence prompts to help students...

Reinforce concepts such as long vowels, spelling patterns, sound clusters, double-final consonants, and syllables with a nature-themed unit. Through a series of extra support lessons, learners compare and contrast using a...

An engaging resource provides many primary source materials to inform a study of the Women's Suffrage Movement. Suggestions include building a timeline of the fight, using the documents as the basis of a DBQ, and/or using a Venn...

Foster's Rule? Allopatric speciation? After watching West of the West's documentary Island Rotation, class members use Venn diagrams to compare endemic species on the Channel Islands with mainland related species. They then create a...

The final installment of a 22-part American history series examines the many faces that make up the country's story. From Henry Ford to Tulio Serrano, scholars use biographical evidence and Internet research to uncover the people behind...

Dwight D. Eisenhower's message to troops for D-Day is iconic. Individuals examine Eisenhower's words and compare that to historians' understanding of the epic events of that day using primary sources, an essay, and a Venn diagram to...

Photos can challenge stereotypes. To gain an understanding of the big picture, groups examine a series of photographs and analyze how a photographer's choices can shape a viewer's reaction to an image. For the first set of photographs,...

What makes heroes and villains? A six-part unit plan asks young scholars to explore the concept of heroism and the characteristics they consider heroic and unheroic. Groups create character maps that focus on how characters are shaped by...

It's nothing new—America has always been a melting pot of cultures. The resource explores the diversity of individuals living in the American colonies during the Revolutionary War. Scholars examine artifacts and primary sources to...

Empowered by the previous lesson where they interviewed a family or community member, young historians examine Angel Island immigrants' oral histories. They use a matrix to record their interpretation of the feelings of the immigrant....

Creation and destruction. Scholars use a Venn diagram to compare the creation story in Ovid's The Metamorphoses with that in the book of Genesis. Pupils then note differences between the two texts and offer suggestions for why the texts...

Teenagers face many temptations, and just saying "No!" can be very difficult. Here's a lesson that provides some help. Learners use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast excerpts from The Odyssey, Tennyson's "The Lotus-Eaters," and the...

Compare and contrast two characters from the book Miss Nelson is Missing. Using a Venn Diagram, have pupils compare and contrast personal characteristics between Miss Nelson and Miss Swamp. Individuals can then share their responses with...

Read the story Gingerbread Baby and use these various activities to connect to grammar, art, and point of view. In one activity, learners create character masks. They practice writing verbs on the back of the masks to tell what each...

Cozy up and listen to a recording of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and The Three Little Javelinas. Then, lead your class in a compare and contrast of the two stories by creating a Venn diagram.

To better understand how the author Kevin Henkes uses the theme of friendship throughout his books, learners engage in several compare and contrast activities. The class reads several Henkes titles and discusses the similarities in...

Examine the elements of nonfiction writings in this lesson. Learners list common features of nonfiction and compare nonfiction and fiction books on the same topic. Create a Venn diagram comparing and contrasting the two genres.

Students identify the themes of different books by classifying their genre.  In this genre lesson, students examine a specific animal by reading both a nonfiction and fiction book about the species.  Students compare the...

Here is a language arts instructional activity that can be used with virtually any grade level. The only thing that changes is the reading level of the books. Learners compare and contrast different heroes and the characteristics they...