Wouldn't it be lovely if people were immune from colds and flu? Alas, such is not the case; however, there are things we can do to avoid getting or spreading these pesky health hazards. Middle schoolers read articles that provide them...

Imagine arguing a real Supreme Court case! Running your own county government! Acting as President for a day! iCivics offers games, web scavenger hunts, and other activities that encourage summer scholars to learn about their communities...

Acknowledge, Care, Tell! Freshmen learn how to ACT to help a friend demonstrating warning signs for depression and suicide in a carefully scaffolded, scripted instructional activity. Scholars also learn positive coping skills,...

Picture this: a fun activity for pupils to discover pixels. After learning about digital signals and pixels, scholars act as senders and receivers of an image. The sender indicates zero or one to tell whether each square in a grid is...

An informative activity focuses on the law preventing Native Americans from voting until 1947. Scholars read documents from the Office of Indian Affairs, complete an online worksheet, and participate in group discussion. Academics learn...

A presentation guides a discussion and opportunity for role-playing about identifying and talking about emotions. To begin, scholars share memories of happiness and unhappiness and how they responded to specific feelings. Then, learners...

A fiction and nonfiction text, The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest by Lynne Cherry and I See a Kookaburra! Discovering Animal Habitats Around the World by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page begins a learning experience in...

Two lessons take a close look at drug prevention. The first lesson, split into two sessions, challenges learners to gather information from an article, answer questions, then create a poster that encourages others to stay away from...

A series of hands-on activities follows a reading of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Learners create a paper collage to explore the beginning, middle, and end of days of the week, numbers, and more. They grow a butterfly...

Let's take a trip to the future. Scholars imagine their future wealthy selves by completing a worksheet based on the year 2025. Then, acting as journalists, they conduct interviews with their classmates to prepare to write an article for...

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 Fair Play Act of 2009 came about due to the actions of one woman. Young historians research Lilly Ledbetter and what she went through to get pay equal to that paid to men for the same work at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The...

Strong emotions may arise at anytime and any where. This activity boosts self-awareness and management for when young learners require assistance with their feelings. Tips include: remaining calm, breathing, explaining how they feel, and...

Young scholars identify feelings through facial expressions and body language. Learners listen for a feeling word, then act it out and discuss how they portrayed it.

Responsible speaker + critical listener = effective communication is the equation at the heart of a responsible listening lesson about the power of words. Class members view the clip of the courtroom scene from the film A Few...

What facts are essential, and what facts are irrelevant when making a decision? As class members continue with the Fallout Shelter exercise, groups develop questions and interview the 10 volunteers acting as candidates for the bomb...

"The Wife of Bath's Tale" and "The Pardoner, His Prologue, and His Tale" from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales take center stage in a lesson that asks scholars to update the tales, craft a script, and either video their version or act it out...

A timelapse video hooks learners' attention to the phases of the moon. After discussing their observations, pupils use the Moon Giant website to view the moon on their birthday and complete a bar graph. The class creates an anchor chart...

Scholars complete a KWL chart to indicate what they know about Cesar Chavez and then research what they want to know about this farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist. To complete the instructional activity, scholars...

Massive storms, shipwrecks, survivors stranded on an island ruled by an aging magician, and strange creatures—Shakespeare's The Tempest appeals to today's middle schoolers. For this unit, seventh graders read selections from an...

Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. All were forced off their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States as part of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Young historians research the tribes' reactions to this removal and...

To understand how the allotment policy embedded in the Dawes Act, passed by the U.S. government in 1887,  affected the tribal sovereignty of Native Americans, young historians examine various maps and documents and Supreme Court...

O. Henry's short story, "The Give of the Magi," launches a study of what motivates people to act as they do. Class members identify what they believe are the motivations of the characters in O. Henry's tale and then craft a one-page...

S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders allows middle schoolers to reflect on mob mentality. After reading an article and watching a video about herd mentality, class members find examples in the novel of when characters go along with the...