Finished your novel? What’s next? Designing the book cover, of course. But how to begin? After examining the covers of published books and noting the common elements of these jackets, young novelists design a front and back cover for...

What is your credit score? How do you find it? Help your pupils answer these questions and more. They will access their free credit report and then analyze its meaning.

Beginning in 1851, Thoreau recorded the dates of the first spring blooms in Concord, and this data is helping scientists analyze climate change! The culminating instructional activity in the series of four has pupils graph and analyze...

Explore the behavior of light waves with a lab activity. Scholars build new vocabulary through experimentation and observation. Using different mediums, they model reflection, refraction, transmission, diffusion, and scattering of light.

Have you ever listened to a song that had a deeper political meaning to it? Every examined a work of art with layers of meaning? Pupils analyze the drawings of Arthur Szyk. They research the deeper meaning of several artistic cartoons...

At the beginning of this Halloween lesson, learners generate a list of spooky characters and words that they will use when creating their original stories. Teams of 3-4 members create the stories together. The lesson includes a handy...

Youngsters become familiar with zoo animals. They sort them into categories, and choose an animal to act out. Two zoo centers are created in the classroom that have examples of the animals for the pupils to play with. Then, they choose...

Here is a good lesson plan on butterflies and caterpillars. After listening to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, young learners put cards that depict the life cycle of a butterfly in the correct order. There are some good ideas for center...

Using geoboards, computer programs, and hands-on manipulative materials, elementary schoolers engage in a study of two and three-dimensional geometric shapes. This instructional activity is chock full of good teaching ideas on the...

Students consider the influence of Hip Hop on their own language use and various segments of American society; they reflect on and demonstrate their knowledge of Hip Hop vocabulary and its use.

Students design a multimedia report on one or more of the fifty states.

High school readers examine George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant" for examples of symbolism, metaphor, connotation, and irony. They analyze how these literary tools convey the writer's main point and contribute to the persuasive...

Students explore Jananese history through the use of the woodblock print called "ukiyo-e" prints. The audience attracted to the prints, their interests and tastes as well as how the prints reflected the life of the merchant class is the...

Students define genre in the visual arts, particularly in Western painting and explain the differences between subject and genre. The genre of a variety of works of art is identified.

Students explore one of the techniques artists often use to highlight important elements within a painting's composition and to move a viewer's eye around the canvass from highpoint to highpoint.

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.

Students examine how artists use color to set the tone of a painting. They analyze and discuss various paintings, complete a chart comparing the artists' color schemes and tones, and write a paragraph comparing two images.

Young scholars examine how allegory is defined and used in the visual arts. They create a list of the arts, and list the objects, symbols, and figures that suggest each art category, analyze various paintings, and identify the...

Students investigate how artists create a story that provides a message or provokes emotions in a single image. The ways in which the composition of a painting contributes to telling the story or conveying the message is examined in this...

Students closely read " To Build a Fire," to explore the use of narrative point of view and debate the distinction between knowledge and instinct. The elements of literary naturalism and how they relate to Jack London's work is examined...

High schoolers examine the controversies over slavery's expansion and how the federal tariffs further entrenched the dividing line between northern and southern interests.

Students analyze "To Build a Fire" by Jack London and "The Open boat" by Stephen Crane. They write an essay in which they compare and contrast the narrators and plots in each story.

High schoolers analyze a character of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to catch a glimpse of a family and the changes they, and the Old South, undergo. The use of time as it relates to the structure of the plot is covered in this...

Students complete a unit of lessons that examine the goals of the Americans during the Revolutionary War. They explore an online interactive map of major campaigns, read and analyze primary source documents, and analyze diplomatic and...