When Rosa Parks took her seat on a public bus to protest segregation, she also took her place in history. Learners examine a clue from this story—a diagram of the bus—to see if they can figure out the pivotal role of  this...

What month is it? Scholars work with a team and play a game to guess which month is described by given clues. While playing, pupils learn more about what makes each month different with a main focus being on the weather.

Readers learn how to use both direct and indirect characterization clues provided by Charles Dickens to understand the complexity of Ebenezer Scrooge's character. Scholars collect evidence of comments Scrooge hears, how he responds to...

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is filled with secrets. Help readers find the clues, solve the riddles and puzzles, and unwrap the mysteries with a six-page guide that includes before, during, and after reading discussion questions and...

The Overcoming Obstacles course for middle schoolers continues with a unit module on communication. In the first lesson, participants engage in a series of activities that help them recognize nonverbal clues and the importance of making...

Middle schoolers get hip to the jive with a lesson about slang. They closely examine examples of slang and use context clues to infer the meaning of the terms. Groups read and summarize an article about a teacher who created a Gen Z...

Close your colonial America unit with a performance-based assessment. Class members will show their proficiency in several skills including using details to back up inferences, determining the meaning of words in context,...

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is an illustrative source of rich prose, deep character development, and strong literary themes. Use two of the book's key chapters, which focus on Waverly's relationship with chess and with her mother, to...

What do modern voices sound like? Scholars explore the topic, reading two concrete poems from John Grandit's Blue Lipstick and analyzing them using a graphic organizer. Next, they read a third poem and work with partners to look for...

It's all about perspective! Using the resource, scholars read a third excerpt from Laurence Yep's autobiography, The Lost Garden. As they read, individuals complete graphic organizers using clues from the text to infer the author's...

Read it and read it again. Scholars do multiple reads of the text The Electric Motor. During the first pass, they read to discover the gist of the text. In the second, pupils use quotes from the article to explain the use of the electric...

Students observe the local environment in relation to sea level variations and examine many clues that indicate sea level change.

Play a little Bingo and learn a little chemistry. The third installment in a 24-part series gives scholars the opportunity to play a game of Bingo while they review the 12 principles of green chemistry. The principles make up the Bingo...

Being a historian requires serious sleuthing. They examine primary source documents and look for evidence, for clues that reveal who wrote the document, when, and why. After watching two historians model the process, young history...

Teens and pre-teens are a prime target for advertisers, so how are they doing it? An interactive lesson highlights the strategies used by advertisers, such as visual imagery and verbal clues. Then, a short writing assignment puts those...

In 2016, one in every four fatal car crashes listed speeding as a contributing factor. Pupils view videos of a car trying to come to a quick stop from four different rates of speed. They use context clues to measure and determine the...

Why is it important to use precise language? Participants explore this question in the fourth activity in a series of 15 on effective instruction. Perfect for all content areas, the activity promotes appropriate language choice through...

The engaging story Rain School is further explored in the third lesson of a larger unit that explicitly teaches close reading skills by answering questions whose answers can only be found inside the text. Through teacher...

Explicitly explained and delightfully detailed are two ways to describe this tenth lesson plan in a larger unit designed for the first few weeks of third grade. Learners continue to use and develop previously learned close reading...

Third graders answer text-dependent questions of the story Nasreen's Secret School both independently and then collaboratively through using the carousel of questions strategy. This plan is the seventh instructional activity in a...

In the second lesson plan in a series that revolves around the story, Thank You, Mr. Falker, learners practice the skill of answering direct questions from the text while using complete sentences. After a teacher-led review of how to...

The sixth lesson plan in this Bullfrog at Magnolia Circle unit assesses your third graders' ability to read and understand informational text. The included assessment asks learners to take notes about the main idea and supporting...

In this mystery state learning exercise, learners answer clues arranged from difficult to easy to identify the state, then locate it on a map.