Conduct a close reading of George G. Toudouze's well-known horror story "Three Skeleton Key." This plan breaks up the reading into several steps and provides text-dependent questions to ask along the way. Learners will have the chance to...

Is it really that big of a deal if the global climate undergoes a little change? Young environmentalists consider this very question as they discuss in small groups the impact of different climate change scenarios on their lives,...

Young readers complete a graphic organizer identifying the main idea and the supporting ideas in a passage taken from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.

All of the gas giant's atmospheres consist of hydrogen and helium, the same gases that make up all stars. The third in a series of 22, the activity challenges pupils to make scale models of the interiors of planets in order to...

Scientists could measure the diameter of the sun before they knew its distance. Scholars construct a simple mirror box to measure the diameter for themselves. They compare this measurement with the official size, listed in a...

Did you know some retailers use curved mirrors in their fitting rooms to make customers look thinner? Pupils view themselves in convex and concave mirrors to understand the difference. The resource includes big ideas for multiple age...

How do you properly illustrate the extreme size difference between two planets—Earth and Jupiter? With the help of jellybeans, of course! Create a scale model of Jupiter's mass compared to Earth using a fishbowl, 1,400 beans, and a...

Why does Earth experience summer, fall, winter, and spring? Using an informative demonstration, learners see how the angle of the sun on Earth and the rotation of Earth determine the seasons. Scholars work in pairs to learn that the...

Help your class understand the magnitude of the distance between Earth and Mars with an activity that asks small groups to use balloons to create scale models of the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Class members figure out the distances...

Germination is an amazing process that results in amazing things. The book The Tiny Seed is the inspiration for a set of activities that will help build early literacy, observation, language, and writing skills. The class observes how...

Paint with the colors of reading! Learners in special education classes or mainstream classes practice decoding basic and advanced code with a series of sentences on paint blobs. Once they read the sentence, learners cover one spot on...

Do big bodies make big brains? Let your learners decide whether there is an association between body weight and brain weight by putting the data from different animals into a scatterplot. They can remove any outliers and then make a line...

What's the most interesting fact about a blue whale? Learners read an interview about the similarities between the Titanosaur and the blue whale displays at the American Museum of Natural History. Pupils learn not only about blue whales...

Life science learners discover the range of peripheral vision. They compare the angles at which they can detect motion, colors, and detailed shapes. 

From traditional sports like football and basketball to more unique or extreme sports like windsurfing, caving, or bungee jumping, your youngsters will surely get a thorough introduction to the world of sports with this lesson plan!

How much does your class know about the Jewish Festival of Lights? Young learners practice Hanukkah vocabulary, including latkes, Judea, sufganiot, and gimel, in a series of word puzzles.

What's that lurking in the shadows? An activity that demonstrates how eclipses happen. Science scholars investigate how light and distance interact to form shadows. The experiment uses simple materials to generate data and observations...

Go study the universe. Pupils learn seven aspects about astronomy and astronomers. They begin to learn about constellations; distance and motion between objects; gravity; the electromagnetic spectrum; dark matter and energy; and teams of...

Create a scaled model of our solar system in your classroom! Scholars work collaboratively to build paper mache planets and hang them in their proper position to showcase each planet's location in the solar system.   

Get big results out of a small-scale lab! Young chemists observe the electrolysis of sodium sulfate using a microscale experiment. A colorful indicator solution combined with the production of gas bubbles yields a variety of observations...

The sun isn't just a ball of yellow! Young scientists learn about the features of the sun using a hands-on modeling activity. They build models of the sun using common household items to represent sunspots, solar prominence, and the...

Examine how pollution makes its way into an ocean with help from a model watershed. Scholars use household items to recreate a mini-watershed, equipped with pollutants, that when mixed with rain drain into a model's body of...

Reach for the STARs! Using the resource, scholars review the STAR (Stop, Think, Act, Review) method and discuss how to use it to solve a math equation. Next, small groups collaborate to solve a common problem in the classroom using the...

Take one giant leap for mankind with a reading passage about the moon. Kids learn about the lunar cycle with context clues and reading comprehension questions, making it a good informational text for your language arts lesson.