How do you assess whether pupils have mastered certain concepts and skills? Designing a performance task that asks learners to demonstrate their skills and providing writers with a rubric that identifies these skills and provides...

Join the newspaper business with a series of lessons and exercises focused on elements of journalism. The packet focuses on distinguishing fact from opinion, writing effective headlines, sequencing events, and editing and...

Experiment with chocolate coating on cookies! What a delightful way to learn about food processing and chemical engineering. Throughout this activity, groups collect measurements and make calculations. They conclude by writing...

Dive into journalism with your high schoolers! The resources provided here will help your learners write unbiased, clear, and succinct newspaper articles. First they spend time sifting through stacks of articles, filling out a graphic...

Use this cross-curricular history lesson to work on your students' informational writing skills. After listening to songs and stories related to Sultana, they engage in a several activities to boost their understanding of slavery and...

Need a musical lesson for your drama or performing arts class? VH1 has put together a really neat lesson, in which learners use biographical information about Alicia Keys to write and perform a one-act musical related to her life. This...

Grab a debatable (or controversial) moment from your current reading, and use this task to progress the persuasive writing skills of your high school scholars. Divide your learners into four small groups and let them collaborate, debate,...

Develop an understanding of the open-ended questions that are a part of the college Common Application. Future college learners collaborate, discuss prompts acquired from the application, and philosophize on their plan of attack for the...

Why did Vietnam POWs and their families receive more media attention than POWs in previous wars?  To answer this question, class members view artifacts, read articles, and engage in class discussion. Individuals then assume the...

Khaled Hosseini’s video “Using Real People and Events” motivates learners to reflect on their own experiences and to use those experiences as the basis of a graphic novel that expresses a universal truth. The richly detailed plan...

A class newsletter? The possible extensions for this activity are endless. After examining examples of news print-outs from hotels or workplaces, class members develop their own articles and produce a newsletter. A great way to keep...

Pair the famous poems "I Hear America Singing," by Walt Whitman, and "I, Too, Sing America," by Langston Hughes, with a more recent poem by Elizabeth Alexander called "Praise Song for the Day" to demonstrate a theme and introduce your...

Introduce your high school scholars as to how to use counterclaims in argument writing. Learners explore this skill with collaborative efforts and technology. Together they explore the pros and cons of homework and develop a thesis for...

Have your class members consider how their lifestyle choices may differ from those of their grandparents when they were younger. After brainstorming and discussing differences in lifestyle, pupils watch a Coca-Cola advertisement that...

Using adjectives to create vivid descriptions is the focus of exercises in this resource. A cloze reading activity asks class members to add missing adjectives to passages from Mark Teague's The Lost and Found. They then read...

The unit study of Angel Island Immigration Station concludes with scholars using information from the previous lessons to craft a news story about the Angel Island program.

High schoolers investigate the dilemma of a proportional response with a lesson about the history of terrorism and militant extremists in the United States. As they examine memos from the FBI and speeches from President Bush and Obama,...

What was life like for enslaved and free black people before the American Civil War? Explore the building tension between states and the freedom of individuals with a thorough social studies lesson. Learners of all ages explore...

Use folk tales as inspiration for learning about and using personification in creative writing. Learners brainstorm together in order to practice personification before writing their own poems or paragraphs about a household object.

Inspire scholars to do their part for planet Earth with a read-aloud of Dr. Seuss's The Lorax, and variety of activities designed to boost the environmental activist in us all. Activities include writing poems about the Earth,...

If a bar of chocolate was on the floor, would you try to pick it up? What if it was covered with glue? The eighth lesson in an 11-part unit designed to accompany The Twits by Roald Dahl has scholars imagine crazy scenarios. The...

Two lessons stress the importance of keeping your classroom bully-free. Discussion, collaborative work, role-play, and writing allows participants to examine whether their classroom is welcoming to new members and decide what they should...

Here is an excellent set of five short lessons and activities intended to help learners not only gain an understand of current issues in Africa, but build critical thinking, synthesis, analysis, expository writing, research, and...

Using sources from various publications and a series of videos, pupils consider the global economy and the positive and negative effects of globalization. With a jigsaw discussion and a writing assignment, scholars weigh in on whether...