Considered an American art form, rap has its roots in places from Jamaica to the Bronx. Using a series of readings, comprehension questions, and videos, scholars explore the history of rap and its connections to the African diaspora....

To be the very best musician one needs to be wiling to practice at home. Here is a handy guide to give your young musicians a leading edge on home music practice. It includes a warm up, cool down, suggestions for setting goals and for...

Paul Simon's "Father and Daughter" offers language learners and native English speakers an opportunity to study adverb, adjective, and noun clauses.

A wonderful presentation explains a musical fairy tale. Perfect for an independent work station or as a link to send home for homework, this slideshow comes equipped with full audio. Each character, theme, and instrument from the piece...

Encourage your pupils to think critically about media and the messages media portrays. Starting off with a quick-write about pop culture, this assignment launches into a hands-on, collaborative collage project. After creating collages,...

Exposing learners to the power of words in poetry is a stimulating way to learn languages. Songs, haikus, rhyming words, and narrative works are all employed in a resource for teaching English as a Second Language.

Lines from Shakespeare and from hip-hop artists provide learners with an opportunity to examine the literary devices these artists use to express their ideas about love. Groups use the provided lines to craft found poems, and then the...

When is using someone else's copyrighted material appropriate? Learn about copyright and fair use with a lesson from PBS.org. Scholars read through a reference sheet about authors' rights and users' rights, and then create posters...

Eliminate all doubt when it comes to sentence structure with nine thorough lesson plans. Whether you want your young writers to vary their sentence structure or shore up their knowledge of conjunctions and semicolons, these lessons are a...

Good Night, Moon is a classic little ones absolutely love. It's a sweet book that can be used, as in this instructional activity, to start a conversation about the difference between night and day. After reading the story, the class...

Get to know your scholars with this in-depth survey that asks learners to rate, answer true or false, write short answers, and draw abstract visuals about their academic and personal preferences.

Prepare class members for formative assessments of student thinking in reading (FAST-R) with a resource that compares Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy" and Maya Angelou's "Caged Bird." Readers respond to 10 multiple choice questions and...

From the time of its publication, Uncle Tom's Cabin has been controversial. To better understand the debate, class members first examine a broadside decrying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and then two newspaper reviews of the...

How do pupils relate paired passages to each other? Here's a resource that helps! The lesson includes a short story and a poem as a set of paired reading passages, followed by some analysis questions. It also includes an essay template...

High schoolers create a collage in response to musical rhythm. In this visual arts lesson plan, students will better understand the connection between visual arts and musical rhythm. High schoolers will follow the teacher's model of...

Here is a complete workbook which leads children as they work through the art of making a musical instrument. The instrument made must be a percussion instrument. The workbook is incredibly thorough and does a good job of leading pupils...

Students demonstrate knowledge of musical instruments and the families of the orchestra. They acknowledge different voice types found in opera. Students interpret emotional expressions through listening. They compose sounds to express...

After reading Acts III and IV of Othello, give your class a fun, interactive, music-related activity. Begin by asking students about songs they have heard in movies or plays. Let them look up the lyrics online and ruminate about the...

Using graphics, and an easy-to-understand format, this resource outlines the different kinds of instruments and their characteristics. This presentation could be used as an introduction to instruments for students getting ready to...

Students use iMovie to express the meaning and context of a protest song from the '60s or '70s. They explore different views of the protest movement and gain an understanding of the emotional and political overtones of the times.

Membranophones? Aerophones? How about strings? Percussion? You need not be a music instructor to benefit from a packet of 24 worksheets that introduce aspiring musicians to the various instrument families.

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...

"The Hare and the Water," a Tanzanian folk tale, lends a global perspective to literary analysis. Learners spend the first two days reading and storyboarding. On day three, they examine folk tale elements (worksheet included), and design...

Encourage readers to determine if Hamlet's madness is actually divinest sense. Class members analyze the words of the play before studying related texts, including T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," scenes from...