Eighth graders take a closer look at Sherman's March to the Sea. In this American Civil War lesson, 8th graders analyze the diary entries of William Miller. Discussion questions are included with the entries. Students create illustrated...

Eighth graders examine the role of Indiana soldiers in the Civil War. For this American Civil War lesson, 8th graders listen to a lecture about the involvement of Indiana soldiers in the war and then analyze letters written home by the...

Social Studies and role-playing can go hand in hand. Learners use supporting evidence found in primary and secondary source material to develop a character from the Five Points neighborhood in the 1850s. Each student takes on the role of...

Really challenge your class when they're reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Provide them with this list of six thought-provoking questions to encourage a deeper analysis. The questions are based off of Bloom's Taxonomy, and a list of...

The death of a parent can turn a child's world upside down. A curriculum guide for The Secret Hum of a Daisy explores defining moments in the main character's life, including the loss of her mother. Chapter-by-chapter discussion...

A series of activities based on Elizabeth George Speare's The Sign of The Beaver takes your class through vocabulary, reading comprehension, and literary analysis. A good packet or collection of assignments for a reading circle.

One of the things that makes Bloom's Taxonomy so effective is that it works off different levels of understanding. Test your readers' knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation with these short questions....

Focus on plot and the impact-specific events in The Cay. Class members use their double-entry journals, created in a previous lesson in this series, to record their thinking about the guiding question as they read chapters 15 through 17....

Students read one of the following books: Minn of the Mississippi, Paddle-to-the-Sea, or Seabird, all by Holling C. Holling, and identify the five themes of geography as well as make a literature journal with chapter field notes. They...

Here is a lesson that incorporates music writing, and reading literature. The class reads chapter eight from the C.S. Lewis classic The Magician's Nephew. Then, just like in the story, they use music as inspiration to create (write)...

How far do your pupils think we should go in the name of science? Class members respond to questions relating to chapter three of Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science and then participate in a four corners...

This lesson asks young readers to predict what will happen to Harry Potter. While the question has been answered by the last book and film in the series, the concept and links provided by The New York Times’ Learning Network are...

Designed as a review of verbs studied in first three chapters in this grammar series, the 16-page packet includes activities, worksheets, games, and assessments.

Promote critical thinking and literary analysis with a short activity. Readers of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart respond to a series of questions modeled on Bloom's Taxonomy.    

Are you working on an Outsiders unit? Use this list of activities to deepen your middle schoolers' understanding of the novel. After reading S.E. Hinton's novel, young readers work on three required activities, including participating in...

Fifth graders examine ways to save and spend money. They look at ways that people earn, save, and spend money using chapters from Tom Birdseye's Tarantula Shoes. They add and subtract decimals to fill in a worksheet entitled, "Is It a...

Knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation. Class members use Bloom's taxonomy to craft six levels of discussion questions for Chris Crowe's novel, Mississippi Trial, 1955. Model questions from Chapter 3, a...

Look back at the third chapter of The Cay with your class. Pupils will conduct a close reading, taking a second look at a chunk of text and responding to a series of text-dependent questions. Wrap up with an analytical writing prompt...

Encourage your learners to examine the setting in Theodore Taylor's The Cay. Pupils work in small groups to put together a description of the setting before reading two more chapters of the book. They use their double-entry journals to...

Building upon prior lessons in the series, this reading and writing exercise requires pupils to look back at their own writing, track character development in the novel The Cay, and analyze how Phillip has changed. The reading focus is...

Take a moment in your Harry Potter unit to assess comprehension. Readers use knowledge gained for the text and from their own experience to answer seven questions based on events in chapters four and five of Harry Potter and...

Only one character receives a name in William H. Armstrong's novel, Sounder—the dog! With the novel study, scholars explore the author's purpose in the unusual decision. They also write similes, answer comprehension and analysis...

In this statistics and probability worksheet, young statisticians solve and complete 13 different problems related to probability, percentages, and normal distributions. They consider data models, assumptions about the models, and find...

Should wilderness areas be preserved or managed? Class members examine primary source documents, including lecture notes, articles, essays and congressional records to better understand the Hetch Hetchy controversy that created a split...