Gustav Holst's The Planets provide young musicians an opportunity to examine how composers can create a suite: a collection of smaller pieces grouped to explore a single topic. After listening to "Jupiter," they examine "Mars" in...

Does the publication date come before or after the title? Should there be a comma between the location and year? The answer depends on whether you're using the MLA, APA, Chicago,4or CSE/CBE style guide. A citation builder clears up...

Your class experiences dozens of messages about beauty every day by reading magazines, watching movies, and listening to the radio. Have them analyze society's view of beauty in groups after discussing several resources, including...

Sometimes the hardest thing about an argument essay writing assignment is coming up with a question. A four-page list of prompts includes a range of topics, from social media and smart phones to video games and sports. The list is a...

Who am I? Pupils work to answer this question through a unit that explores personal narratives and identity. Exit tickets for activities that examine different poems, short stories, and autobiographical writing serve as prewriting for...

What do cereal, fog, and space shuttles have to do with newspapers? A collection of science investigations encourage critical thinking using connections to the various parts of the newspaper. Activities range from building origami seed...

"Friend, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears..." Those words begin one of the most persuasive speeches in literature. Explore the elements of persuasion in a series of lessons related to William Shakespeare's Julius...

An activity boosts readers' fluency in reading common phrases and idioms. Peers time one another and track their progress using phrase cards and record sheets.

Peers work together to boost fluency by timing each other as they read and sort multisyllabic words. Record sheets keep track of participants' progress.

Prefixes, affixes, roots, and word parts are the focus of a lesson designed to boost scholars' speed and accuracy. Peers work collaboratively to time one another while reading word cards. Answers, scores, and times are recorded to track...

Using technology, learners create and deliver a multimedia autobiographical presentation to present to the class. This ambitious lesson has learners use a variety of sources both old and new; magazines, poster board, the Internet, and...

After going over the five steps of the writing process, pupils fill out "Getting to Know You" worksheets. They trade papers with each other, and have the task of writing a descriptive paragraph about the person whose worksheet they...

Even an outline can give you enough information to execute an awsome project. The tasks for each of the seven weeks of this project are defined, as well as the objective and specific content facilitated through the project. Learners will...

Learners interview a veteren of any of the major U.S. wars. They must identify one quote from the veteren that sums up their experience.

Students study self-portraits taken by photographers to explain the technique and symbolism used. They decide what they would like to say about themselves in their images and then, take pictures of each other. They create an iPhoto book.

After listening to the story, The Best Part of Me, learners will identify a positive physical feature of themselves, and create a descriptive poem about their favorite feature. Photographs are taken, and a nice final draft of the poem is...

Help learners improve multiplication skills by skip counting and creating their own multiplication word problems. They will begin by practicing skip counting and then illustrate word problems using a software program. Pixie is a software...

Scary stuff! Whether approached as the first horror story or a "serious imaginative exploration of the human condition," Frankenstein continues to engage readers. Here's a packet of activities that uses Mary Shelley's gothic...

Students write a biographical poem about themselves. They observe a teacher-led demonstration, write an autobiographical poem and a biographical poem about a famous person using a template form, and display the poems side-by-side.

Students explore the challenges of those who have "learning disabilities." They develop a storyboard and create a video which depicts learning disabled students coping with life. Special effects are added to the video scenes, as well as...

Examine how addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division relate to and are separate from each other. As they listen to the book, The Doorbell Rang, they demonstrate the math described in the story by cutting up paper cookies...

Students create questions to pose to adults working in Middle School. In groups, students create a video interviewing the Middle School staff. They edit the video and format present it as an introduction to Middle School for perspective...

Students describe idioms and their use in everyday language. They describe the difference between literal and idiomatic meanings. In groups, students use iPhoto to create books that explain and illustrate a variety of idioms describing...

Discover how to use prefixes and suffixes to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words. The group views a jovial video on the topic, and then they create a chart of prefix and suffix meanings to identify the meanings of words in a social...