Illustrative Mathematics
Color Week
Practice counting by ones up to 20 with your kindergartners using this colorful class experiment. There are two versions for the lesson. Version 1: The Friday beforehand, send home a notice for the week assigning a different color for...
Computer Science Unplugged
Harold the Robot — Thinking About Programming Languages
Get young programmers thinking about programming languages with an activity that asks class members to craft directions for one person (teacher, another adult, or a class mate) acting as a robot. Participants direct the robot to...
Computer Science Unplugged
Sharing Secrets—Information Hiding Protocols
Did you know that you can find the average age of a group of people without anyone having to real their age? This resource provides directions for way to do just that. After the activity, class members read a short passage that provides...
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Biomass: Biogas Generator
It's a gas. Middle schoolers build a biogas generator following the directions in this resource. After a few days of observation, they demonstrate that the gas given off by the decomposing manure is flammable. The activity concludes as...
Computer Science Unplugged
Phylogenetics
Introduce your class to the concept of creating phylogenetic trees by playing a game of Telephone. Participants create a mixed-up message and through the use of distance matrices, the evolution of the message is recreated.
Teach Engineering
Discovering Phi: The Golden Ratio
Fe, phi, fo, fum. This activity leads pairs to find the ratio of consecutive terms of the Fibonacci sequence. The pairs find that the Fibonacci sequence can be found in many places. A discussion with the class shows that the ratios found...
International Technology Education Association
Launch a Frisbee into Orbit!
How fun it must be to play Frisbee in space! That is just what a NASA engineer gets to do, and you can learn how, too. Follow the instructions provided in this informational article to create your own satellite launcher. Afterward,...
Curated OER
Butterfly Life Cycle
Focused little scientists will flitter their arms back and forth across the room with excitement as they learn the life cycle of a butterfly and how living things grow and change over time.
Core Knowledge Foundation
Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue
Young adventurers embark on a journey, setting sail along the blue ocean with Christopher Columbus. Teachers will find that this unit makes their lesson planning smooth sailing!
ESL Kid Stuff
Past Tense Activities - Regular Verbs
Here is a supplemental lesson plan regarding past tense verbs for English language learners that is a great tool for the classroom when you are teaching grammar exercises.
Achieve3000
Discriminating Phonemes
Develop the fluency of beginning readers one sound at a time with this phonemic awareness lesson. Through a series of whole-class instruction, independent practice, and collaborative learning activities, children practice identifying the...
NSW Department of Education
Relationships Between Formal Measurement Units: Measure and Record Mass in Kilograms and Grams
Teach the masses about the metric system with this hands-on measurement lesson. Given a fruit or vegetable, learners estimate, measure, and convert its mass using the metric units gram and kilogram.
Oglebay Institute
Post-Impressionism: Mosaic Still-life
A still life with tissue paper? Why not! Using Paul Cézanne's art as inspiration, learners create their own still life pictures by gluing various colors of tissue paper onto a paper or pattern.
Oglebay Institute
Post-Impressionism: Pointillism
How can little dots in two colors make a third color? Experiment with pointillism and color mixing with a series of activities. After viewing paintings by Seurat and watching a teacher demonstration, pupils create samples of three...
NASA
Solar System Scale & Size
Use a variety of whole fruits to represent the different planets in the solar system to introduce scale sizes to your math or space science class. They follow suit by creating a non-scaled model of the solar system using specific-colored...
Exploratorium
Bubble Tray
Create jumbo bubbles and use them to teach about surface tension or interference, perfect for a physical science lesson on light or molecular attraction.
Exploratorium
Bone Stress
Lighten up a bit with this activity! Use an old-fashioned overhead projector to shine light through a pair of polarizing filters. Place a stressed plastic object in between and display the colors of light waves revealed! Rotate the...
NorthEast Ohio Geoscience Education Outreach
Investigation of Plate Boundaries
Demonstrate the movement of lithospheric plates due to convection in Earth's mantle. Learners then model the movements that occur along plate boundaries using colored clay.
NorthEast Ohio Geoscience Education Outreach
Hydrology and Landforms
Three days of erosion exploration await your elementary geologists. Learners begin by examining rivers via Google Earth, then they model water flow in sand, and finally, they identify resulting landforms. This lesson is written...
NorthEast Ohio Geoscience Education Outreach
Density and Pressure of a Hot Air Balloon
Using a dry cleaner bag and a blow dryer, create a hot air balloon! The materials list suggests obtaining one dry cleaner bag per student, but since this is probably inconvenient, consider doing this as a demonstration during a lesson on...
Middle School Computer Projects
Timeline of Your Life
Pupils can use PowerPoint as a tool to create clear timelines that show their lives in relationship to historical events. Take a trip to the computer lab and share this page with your class. Class members can watch each video and follow...
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Writing Workshop: Writing a Compare-Contrast Essay
Crafting a compare-contrast essay can prove to be a challenge even for experienced writers. Eradicate the mystery with a PowerPoint that details the rationale for and the structure of this form of expository writing. The 20-slide...
US Environmental Protection Agency
Corals and Chemistry
After demonstrating the use of cabbage juice as a pH indicator, have your class experiment with their own breath, exhaling into the indicator, to show that carbon dioxide is acidic. As learners work, they also watch a video about coral...
Baylor College
About Air
Give your class a colorful and tasty representation of the components of the mixture that we call air. Pop a few batches of popcorn in four different colors, one to represent each gas: nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide. The...