It's back-to-school time, and what better way to get learners to know each other than with icebreakers? Bring a list of icebreakers, ranging in grade levels, to the new members of your class. 

Find out how many of your learners take the bus, how many walk, and how many bike with a quick survey. Class members gather data about how each individual gets to school and mark the results on this page in order to create a bar graph.

Here's a great way to build community during the first days of the new school year. Participants read personal narratives, then craft and share their stories with others.

Names come with all sorts of nuances and can influence how we see ourselves and how others see us. To gain insight into the power of names, class members journal about their names and then read a short essay about a girl and her feelings...

If you could frame something important to you, what would it be, where would you hang it, and why would you choose this particular thing to frame? These questions launch a lesson designed to help class members get to know each other....

“It was a miracle.” Basil Heatter’s “The Long Night of the Little Boats,” which details the miraculous rescue of the British army from the shores of Dunkirk in 1940, is featured in a series of exercises that ask class members to read,...

Here's a fresh take on those first days of school introductions. Learners use Flipgrid to create a video that introduces themselves to their classmates. The richly detailed and carefully scaffolded lesson provides specific directions for...

Many of us have multiple identities. There's who we are at home, school, friends, and strangers. And often these identities come with different names. The third activity in the First Days of School series examines how names reflect...

Inspire kindness in and out of school with a lesson that challenges scholars to perform 100 acts of kindness during the time between Martin Luther King Jr. Day to Valentine's day. Leading up to a celebration of friendship, learners...

The final lesson in the First Days of School series focuses on how to build a classroom community where all class members can feel safe, heard, and valued. The resource includes step-by-step directions for engaging pupils in developing...

Rumpelstiltskin understood the power of names. The second lesson in the First Days of School series focuses on building community by recognizing the importance of the relationships among names, identities, and cultures. Learners engage...

Who can get to 100 first?! It may be in the hands of chance, but either way kids will have to practice counting and adding along the way. Partners take turns rolling two dice and moving their game pieces that many spaces until one pupils...

Temptation is the focus of this lesson plan, which was designed for the first week of Lent as an introduction to the tradition of Lenten fast. It includes reading of biblical scripture, hands-on activities where learners design cards...

Engage your class while learning about the US Constitution with this fun primary grade social studies instructional activity. After viewing a picture of the US Constitution, young learners piece together a US flag...

Tackle ethics in your high school history classes with a Socratic seminar about torture as a means for obtaining information. The plan allows for pupils to take the reins during the seminar. On the first day, class members read several...

Time to rock out! Discover the "life" cycle of the average rock using an illustrative stations lab and stimulating pairs game. Roll the dice to determine your fate: will it be melting in magma or chilling out to form igneous rock? The...

Use a set of quick and easy to use literacy centers at the beginning of the year as you start to assess your students. The 13-page packet provides writing and reading activities with simple directions that allows new class members...

High school classes can use manipulatives too! Offer hands-on, interactive lessons that venture away from the typical day in your algebra class. Young mathematicians will be involved in collaborative learning, visual...

The first activity may not work for your class if you don't have access to an open area of 30 meters and two cars of different masses, but the remaining activities can be used in any physics course. They all involve the investigation of...

There's a lot of thought that goes into setting up safe and supportive classroom environments. From establishing a whole group meeting area and arranging desks, to organizing classroom supplies and creating bulletin board displays,...

Twenty-three, fun-filled activities make up a list of icebreakers designed to familiarize class members with one another, and add a sense of community to the classroom. 

Happy Pi Day! This collection of games, experiments, and activities leads participants through an exploration of the many aspects and attributes of that mysterious quantity, pi. Activities range from using statistical...

Name that statistic! Classmates each write their name and the number of letters in it on a sticky note to place on the board. As a class, they determine the median, mode, and range of the name lengths, and create a dot plot of the data....

The stage is set for you to guide future physicists through three forceful activities about motion. In the first, learners experiment with rolling carts to discover how objects interact. In the second, they inspect images of an object in...