How did scientists discover what lies beneath the earth's surface? Dig a hole? X-ray vision? Guide your class through the types of seismic waves and how these waves helped shed light on Earth's many layers. The included resources provide...

Explore the measures of central tendency through a challenging task. Given values for the mean, median, mode, and range, collaborative groups create a set of data that would produce those values. They then critique other answers and...

Sound, sight, taste, touch, and smell—oh the world of senses! What do these five senses have to do with the brain? The answer: everything. Explore how the brain sends and receives messages by having the class participate in several sense...

Launch your classes into a modeling lesson. Young scholars watch angry bird trajectories and make predictions based on their knowledge of quadratic functions. The lesson includes a series of questioning strategies to lead learners to the...

One cyclist goes to great lengths to make his proposal! Your classes must figure out just what length that is. Using a map with a bike route that spells out Marry Me, learners calculate the total distance of the ride. They base their...

Who says playing around in class is a bad idea? Precocious physicists engage in building mechanisms that include cams, gears, pulleys, and levers using an interactive lesson. After completing toy tutorials about each topic, users build a...

How does the Supreme Court Miranda decision affect court cases? Scholars watch a video about the decision, discuss its application in various cases, fill out multiple handouts, and work in groups to better understand how much weight the...

A spark of static electricity contains up to 3,000 volts, while a lightning strike contains around 3,000,000 volts. To understand electricity, its power, and the safety considerations relating to it learners engage in a comprehensive...

After the Holocaust, the world grappled with how to bring justice to the Nazis. But what to do with the thousands—if not millions—who allowed it to happen? Young historians consider the issues of guilt, collaboration, and responsibility...

Two lessons stress the importance of keeping your classroom bully-free. Discussion, collaborative work, role-play, and writing allows participants to examine whether their classroom is welcoming to new members and decide what they should...

Scholars test their skills of reading body language with a collaborative learning experience that focuses on showing and identifying emotions. Pairs take turns acting out an emotion, one uses body language while the other guesses what...

What's more important ... an ice cream store or a police station? How about a school or a hospital? Using a simulation game, pupils allot resources as the federal government would based on the census. Discussion questions round out the...

The party is over. Now it's time to get to work! Learners acting as agents for a country during the modern Age of Empires develop proposals to negotiate trade deals between the rising global powers. Using research from previous lessons,...

Bring evaporation right into the hands of young scientists with an entertaining, hands-on activity. Investigators view videos and images while participating in class dialogue focused on water evaporating from surfaces. A short experiment...

Freedom for the few! An interesting lesson focuses on the Maryland Constitution and its lack of freedom for African Americans. Scholars examine the premise of freedom for all—which only extended to a limited few.  Academics complete...

Can the class think like the scientists on the International Space Station? Engineers design, test, collect data, and improve a water filtration device similar to a system found on the ISS. Participants use pH strips, optional...

Looking for an out-of-this-world volcanic activity? Geologists study Earth's volcanic history and the neighboring planet Mars by modeling volcanic eruptions, lava flows, and building a shield volcano. Participants use graph paper and...

Tests are no fun, but test cases are extremely helpful. Pupils work in groups to write a Java program that completes a given task. They come up with test cases to give to another group, then trade test cases to determine if their program...

One of Aesop's fables begins with a lesson about cooperation and teamwork. Scholars listen carefully, taking note of the moral of the story. The class discusses their findings and why working with others makes work easier. Learners share...

Finding the central idea in a text can be as simple as deciphering the correct pieces of supporting evidence. As your class reads Stage 4 of "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" by Karen Russell, they analyze the interactions...

Bud followed a series of rules from Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis. The question is, how did he use those rules to thrive or survive? After a grand discussion, class members explore the novel to locate and cite textual...

Introduce your classes to a new world of mathematics. Pupils learn to call trigonometric ratios by their given names: sine, cosine, and tangent. They find ratios and use known ratios to discover missing sides of similar...

The manipulation of time is one of the most essential elements in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. As your language arts class participates in a jigsaw discussion activity, they work together to analyze the play's plot structure and...

Challenge classes to think deeply and apply their understanding of polynomials. The assessment prompts learners to use polynomial functions to model different situations and use them to make predictions and conclusions.