This activity may have writers evaluate short compositions, but their subjects are quite tall: great Americans. Pupils read one another's compositions and closely examine how specific phrases and diction contribute to shaping American...

A thorough instructional activity on persuasive writing takes middle schoolers through several activities, including group discussion, collaborative posters, and independent writing. They compare historical speeches and analyze the...

Militaries throughout history have used topography information to plan strategies, yet many pupils today don't understand it. Scholars use Legos and a contour gauge to understand how to construct and visualize topographic profiles. This...

Combine your friendly letter lesson, grammar lesson, and technology lesson with this fun activity! Young writers compose letters to friends, and then convert the text to Webdings font. Their friends then decode the letter based on a key....

Small groups learn about a present-day nomadic culture in Mongolia and the threats to its existence by exploring a photo essay. The resource includes thoughtful discussion and writing prompts about cultural sustainability, the...

Explore the effect of outliers through an analysis of mean, median, and standard deviation. Your classes examine and compare these measures for two groups. They must make sense of a group that has a higher mean but lower median compared...

Kids take a critical look at each other's work in order to understand the editing process while providing constructive suggestions. This handout really sets learners up to successfully offer constructive critique to their...

A unique writing lesson, this plan begins with learners talking about multiculturalism in small groups. Each learner will choose a picture from a newspaper, describe it to their small group, and think about how it relates to...

Budding poets create two acrostic poems, one for their name and another using a word of their choice. Over the course of five days, scholars compose, revise, publish, and share their work with their peers.

Class members study the size of classmates' feet and perform a statistical analysis of their data. They solve for central tendencies, quartiles, and spread for the entire group as well as subgroups. They then write a conclusion based on...

Scholars examine newspaper articles and highlight two sight words to discover which appears more frequently. They then glue sight words onto paper to make flashcards before composing, writing, and creating picture representations of...

After reading Loree Leedy's There's a Frog in My Throat: 440 Animal Sayings a Little Bird Told Me, kids create and illustrate their own poems that convey the meaning of an idiom. The poems are then transferred into Shutterfly's Photo...

A reading of Peggy Parish's Amelia Bedelia launches a study of idioms. Groups then select several idioms, write the meaning of the expressions, draw or select images, and use GIMP or Photoshop to create an idiom book. 

What a creative and engaging project to incorporate into your studies of the 1920s! Your young historians will work in groups to design a magazine discussing the political and cultural topics of the decade, each member writing one...

Class members work to translate the Declaration of Independence into their own words, as well as design a Facebook page within the context of 1776 to raise public awareness about the document and its meaning for citizens.

Introduce and challenge the essay organization skills of your junior high writers with the paper reconstruction activity in this demonstration.  Theydetermine what the word organization means, and discover the basic organizational...

Read and discuss "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and the gender issues that the story brings up. Use articles from the time period to analyze, complete with specific discussion questions. After two days, scholars write an essay based on topics...

Double click that mouse because you just found an amazing lesson! This cross-curricular Ornithology lesson incorporates literature, writing, reading informational text, data collection, scientific inquiry, Internet research, art, and...

Couches, carpets, and even computer keyboards now advertise they are spill-resistant, but what does that mean? Scholars use physical and chemical methods to coat surfaces with thin films to test their hydrophobic properties. Then they...

Teach learners how to interact with both fiction and non-fiction text with a packet of activities and worksheets. After looking over text structure and the difference in text features between different types of writing,...

Middle schoolers engage in a instructional activity which reminds them that root words indicate the base meaning of a word, and that those roots are found in many different words that have similar meanings. Pairs of pupils use...

Use this well-developed class period to introduce your junior high learners as to how to provide effective feedback concerning their classmates' writing. The plan includes a warm-up, review, introduction, guided and independent practice,...

Give your mathematicians this set of data and have them create a dot plot, then find mean and median. They are asked to question the values of the mean and median and decide why they are not equal. Have learners write their answers or...

The second lesson plan in a five-part poetry unit asks seventh graders to construct a metaphor poem. First, pupils examine Emily Dickinson's "The Railway Train" and identify the metaphor. They then select an object and an animal and...