Twenty-eight lessons make a unit that focuses on skills practice. Lessons explore r-controlled vowels, past tense verbs, nouns, adjectives, and two-syllable words. Pupils read a story, answer questions, and draft a descriptive essay...

Build visual literacy, discussion, and critical thinking skills with an innovative art lesson. Young analysts discuss the use of decalcomania, surrealism, and automatism in various contemporary pieces, discuss constructed truth, and...

In a comprehensive unit of activities, learners explore the five senses. Youngsters discover the many different body parts and their functions that allow humans to have sense of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing. The best way to...

Over the course of five periods, scholars create a poetry portfolio. They begin with a reading of the poem, Firefly. With a focus on vocabulary, learners reread the poem then look for sight words and other skills. 

The depth of Nineteen Eighty Four is in the details. Encourage a close reading of Orwell's dystopian classic with resource sheets that focus attention on the author's stylistic choices that lead to the betrayals that make Big Brother's...

It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. Fifth graders prove this with help from three lessons that examine how ancient cultures used their needs to drive innovations. In lesson one, pupils identify main ideas and supporting...

Focus, confirm, respond.  Middle schoolers engage in a series of activities designed to help them improve their listening skills. They listen to and try to solve a riddle and play a version of the telephone game. Participants learn...

Can beautiful words change the world? Literary scholars discover how to paint their visions of change using poetry in a series of three workshops. Each independent topic gives participants a chance to examine their feelings about...

Complex, disturbing, and challenging, Beloved is the focus of a instructional activity that provides three activities to guide a close reading of Toni Morrison's novel. Readers create chapter titles based on key plot elements...

Nine lessons over three weeks explore the human body through read-alouds. Third graders listen to and discuss a reading followed by extension activities, including word work and comprehension practice. Learners draft a narrative essay.

When we think of ocean exploration, many of us have visions of sunken pirate ships full of treasure or mysterious creatures of the deep. What really motivates deep-sea investigation? The first in a series of diverse six-part lessons...

Financial literacy is generally focused on personal spending and saving, but consider an opportunity to talk to your pupils about how charitable giving can also factor into money management and how it can enhance life for both...

America was founded by dreamers, and the American dream still resonates in our country today. Track the American dream from its Puritan beginnings to its optimistic descendants with a instructional activity that focuses on speeches...

Here are three guided reading lesson plan templates; each designed to meet the needs of a specific level of readers. Levels in focus are emergent, early, and transitional readers. Additionally, prompts to support your small group...

No need to change anything about the resource. The first of eight modules in the MVP Geometry unit focuses on transformations in the coordinate plane. It connects translations, rotations, and reflections to congruence, symmetry, and...

Wait, you mean researchers don't all use Wikipedia? Teach your class about intelligent research with a instructional activity about evaluating digital sources. The instructional activity starts with a quickwrite and includes...

To conclude a study of social justice and tolerance designed to prepare classes for a visit to the Museum of Tolerance, class members brainstorm a safe and peaceful world. They then write about their own vision of this world.

It is entirely fitting and proper that Wilfred Owen’s powerful “Dulce et Decorum Est” is the poem used for an exercise in close reading, discussion, analysis, and argumentative writing. Class members discuss focus questions in pairs,...

The poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the focus of a unit that asks readers to consider how an artist's life and changes in society influences his or her work. After careful study of Whitman's and Dickinson's perspectives on...

Students explore line in painting and drawing and examine how it is defined in the visual arts. Recognizing line in the composition of a number of art works and how it affects these works of art is the focus of this instructional activity.

Take a deep dive into Oregon's ecosystems, plants, and changes from the past to the future. Many hands-on activities in an environmental science unit delight scholars, including creating a field guide for a local park. The in-depth study...

How did scientists discover what lies beneath the earth's surface? Dig a hole? X-ray vision? Guide your class through the types of seismic waves and how these waves helped shed light on Earth's many layers. The included resources provide...

Focus on poetry this summer to enhance those comprehension, fluency, and language skills with a set of resources intended to explore different types of poetry, specifically lyric poetry. The daily activities contain differentiation ideas...

The second instructional activity in a unit on set design focuses on the importance of historical and stylistic research. Working in teams created in the previous session, groups consider what resources they will use as they consider...