Surprise! is the theme of this series of challenge activities. The surprise comes from the information your scholars will discover when researching topics such as alligators and crocodiles, living in other countries, becoming a...

Using clues provided by the images, kids cut out, color, and paste together the bodies of children playing in the snow.

Greed is the theme of the West African folktale, Anansi Goes to Lunch and this multidisciplinary collection of lessons. First, scholars listen to a read aloud and participate in a grand conversation about the book's key details and...

It can be awfully hard teaching young children how to read, but this phonics resource will make the job a little easier. Focusing on the au and aw vowel digraphs, this collection of engaging activities teaches beginning...

Young theatre artists engage in a scavenger hunt to acquaint themselves with set design. The challenge is to search the site and match a separate maquette with each of the 24 clues.

Strap on those backpacks, it's time to travel through history with this literature unit based on the first four books of The Magic Tree House series. While reading through these fun stories, children create story maps, record...

Walk your pupils through the beginning of My Antonia by Willa Cather with a read-aloud-style activity. The goal is to make predictions and back them up with textual evidence.

"Who says a pen has to be called a pen? Why not call it a frindle?" Inspired by this quote from the award-winning novel written by Andrew Celements, this lesson allows children to invent their own...

While humans have always been on the move, the period between 1400 and 1800 saw vast migrations of people between the East and the West. These migrations—whether through slavery or a desire to colonize new lands—shaped the modern world....

Making inferences and drawing conclusions is a key component to successful active reading. Encourage your class to use context clues and prior knowledge to infer different elements of a story, including the setting, plot, and character...

Explore the structure of narrative writing with this fun, collaborative instructional activity. Start by reading aloud a short story, asking small groups of learners to fill in key events on a large story board prepared on the class...

Turn simple pencil sketches into colorful engravings. After first creating hand-drawn pictures, young artists then trace over them will ball point pens, etching the images into cold press illustration boards, before rubbing...

Can we learn a thing or two about history by looking at pictures from the past? As young historians view 2-D and 3-D primary source photographs, they respond to a series of worksheets that guides them toward unveiling clues...

Readings of fiction and nonfiction texts followed by a series of activities put scholars in an archaeologist's shoes. Learners read two texts, Archaeologists Dig for Clues by Kate Duke and The Shipwrecked Sailor: An Egyptian Tale with...

How are simple machines used in professional settings? To find out, scholars examine various pictures, cross-reference a list of simple machines, and write or verbally share how those items are used in specific jobs.

Present tense verbs are the focus of a 24-page packet designed for language learners and loaded with activities, worksheets, and exercises. Step-by-step directions, materials lists, and variations for each lesson are included. A solid...

The American Museum of Natural History offers a website sure to engage young anthropologists. Learners can dig into a site that offers an explanation of the field of archaeology, the kinds of questions archaeologists ask that launch...

Test your learners' sensory awareness with three hands-on activities that ask pupils to use their other senses to identify and describe everyday objects hidden from sight.  

Conditional constructions (If I were, if he had, etc.) are the focus of a 29-page grammar packet packed with exercises for language learners.

If you’re going to get a tattoo, make sure your artist writes it right because it’s hard to correct their inkings. That’s the big idea in this short lesson on commonly misspelled words like their/there/they’re and it’s/its.  Images...

Decode primary sources in a fast-paced activity. A quick guessing game helps pupils use visual clues to understand primary sources. Academics look at a picture of the cotton gin and must guess what it is without other knowledge or clues....

Here's a great way to make vocabulary words drawn from Edward Bloor's novel Tangerine memorable. Kids create a word square, and in one quadrant write the word. A picture goes in a second quadrant, the definition in a third, and a...

Choose a flute of cool fruit today. The /oo/ sound is featured in this activity designed to help kids develop the conscious awareness of the sound structure of words. After identifying and highlighting the /oo/ sound in a list of 39...

Readers of Mississippi Trial, 1955 engage in a desktop teaching activity and teach other class members the meaning of a word from Christopher Crowe's novel using an embellished illustration of their word.