You can claim that soda rots people's teeth or that dinosaurs were actually birds, but your claim will not stand up if it is not backed by evidence. A handout from UNC Writing Center, the seventh in the Writing the Paper series of 24,...

Phrases such as "This paper is going to be about" and "I am going to tell you about" do not make for effective thesis statements. A handout from the UNC Writing Center helps writers break from those phrases to craft effective thesis...

What are the elements of a good social media post? The 13th activity in the 16-part Social Media Toolbox incorporates all of the typical components found in a Facebook or Twitter post. Scholars work together to create great posts based...

English might be a tough language to learn, but at least all words have a specific purpose! A handout from The Writing Center at UNC outlines the purposes of articles in the English language. Discover which types of nouns need articles...

Hey teacher, what's that weird thing with a period on top and a comma on the bottom? If you've ever received a question like this, it may be time to review the handout on semi-colons, colons, and dashes. Part of a larger series of...

Water is the source of life. It appears in poetry in both peaceful and torrential descriptions; it appears in earth science in its liquid, gaseous, and solid states. Combine these interpretations of our planet's most precious and...

Budding scientists fall hard for a gravitational field strength activity! Physics pupils compare the masses and distances relative to the center of planets using an interactive from a Circular and Satellite Motion series. Individuals...

Every neighborhood has its own unique cast of characters, and the crew in the novel Hello Universe is no exception. The characters in Erin Entrada Kelly's novel take center stage in a study guide based on the text....

Figure out what to do when there is no grid to count. Using a ruler and a sharp pencil, the narrator shows how to perform a dilation when the figure is not on a grid. The ray method works by drawing a ray from the center of dilation...

Why would someone want to leave home? The age-old question is at the center of a thought-provoking activity. Scholars consider why humans move around the world both during pre-historical times and today using a PowerPoint, reading on...

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream takes center stage in an interactive designed for an audience of English learners. After watching a short animated version of the play, individuals read a printed version of the script, match the...

Take a central look at data. The differentiated lesson plan provides activities for pupils to calculate central tendencies. Scholars begin choosing three central tendency activities from a Tic-Tac-Toe board. Learners then choose from...

Go around and around with slope. The class investigates tornadoes by watching videos, building a homemade tornado, and performing research on the Storm Prediction Center website. Groups gather data and create scatter plots for twisters...

A instructional activity centers itself around the topic of family roles. A whole-class discussion uses puppets and posters to go in-depth into the following character traits; caring, responsibility, respect, and cooperation. The...

Use graphs to interpret life in 136 counties. Pupils analyze histograms and describe the shapes of the distributions of data collected from several counties on different aspects of life. Scholars make predictions on the difference in...

Biking may be an outlier. Using data from 10 states on the number of people reporting they bike to work, pupils calculate the measures of center. Scholars determine the range and interquartile range and find which provides a better...

More education in statistics is always beneficial. Given cards that provide the proportion of adults with bachelor's degrees in 10 random US states, scholars individually determine the sample percentage of states in which more than 30...

Two Supreme Court cases, Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education take center stage in a lesson about the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Class members research both cases to compare and contrast the rulings.

A 25-page packet includes eight detailed lesson plans centered around poems by Emily Dickinson. Each lesson begins with a burning question that students attempt to answer by using evidence from Dickinson's poems.

Susan B. Anthony's speech "Is It a Crime for Women to Vote?" takes center stage in a lesson that asks class members to consider how they might respond to what they consider an unjust law. Groups work through the speech paragraph by...

Create a web of integers. Individuals play an online game as spiders. Pupils find two integers with a sum to a target number displayed in the center of a web. The player with the most combinations at the end of the time wins.

Losing isn't any fun. It is, however, a part of competing. Two activities encourage middle schoolers to consider what good sportsmanship is, how they can be a good sport, and ways to handle situations when some are acting...

Examine a time of political division and upheaval— not unlike our own—using firsthand accounts. While study of the Civil War often takes center stage in the classroom, the 1850s and 1860s were a period of profound change in other areas...

Light up middle schoolers' understanding of the monetary and health costs of smoking with two activities. First, class members calculate how much a smoker would spend in a year if they smoke a pack a week or a day. They then explore...