Everyone knows that George Washington was the first president, but do your scholars know why that was so important? The lesson plan, the third in a sequence of three, allows learners to understand how George Washington set a precedent...

Though there could be no true justice for the horrors of the Holocaust, many of those responsible for crimes against humanity were found guilty in the eyes of the law. Using primary and secondary sources in the 16th installment of a...

Women's voices are becoming more prominent in the world of literature, but for centuries, this wasn't the case. Young historians research a woman whose writings are considered to be lost, out of print, or forgotten. They develop an oral...

Help your class make sense of nutrition labels with the ninth lesson of this series. After explaining the different information provided on packaged food labels, perform an activity that demonstrates the amount of sugar in a single can...

Immediately capture the attention of your class with the smell of freshly popped popcorn in the sixth lesson of this series on the needs of living things. Young scientists first use their senses to make and record observations of...

Enrich your study of living things with these cross-curricular math activities. Following along with the story Tillena Lou's Day in the Sun, learners will practice addition and subtraction, learn how to measure volume and length,...

Youngsters are introduced to the concept of an emergency, develop plans and kits for addressing those emergencies, identify community helpers, and practice their phone number and address in this five-lesson mini-unit.

Want your class to use critical thinking when discussing vocabulary? Go beyond the dictionary with a vocabulary activity based on Gary Paulsen's Hatchet. Kids write the word in the center of a graphic organizer that also provides...

Looking for stimulating writing prompts that won't make young writers cringe? A set of five personal narrative writing prompts engages pupils in analyzing, thinking, connecting, and writing about particular topics. Each...

The man who invented the earliest examples of chemical engineering was an American-born, French-educated, free man of color before the Civil War, and went on to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. There is something of...

Pupils determine the pattern in collinear points in order to determine the next point in a sequence. Using the definition of slope, they practice using the slope formula, and finish the activity with three different ways to...

Numbers that are very large or very small are difficult to express in standard notation. Pupils learn how to convert between standard and scientific notation. They also multiply and divide the numbers in scientific notation. 

It is just magnetic. This resource presents the concept of Earth's and another planet's magnetic field and how spacecrafts detect them. Learners study a problem using magnetometers and participate in three experiments to come up with a...

Can you beat the odds of cancer? In the first installment of a seven-part series, future biomedical engineers consider how to detect and diagnose cancer. An article on biosensors provides useful information toward this goal.

President Lincoln believed in the Thirteenth Amendment so strongly that he signed 14 copies of it, but died before he could see it passed on December 18, 1965. Explore the text that forever abolished slavery in America with a document...

It's a bird, it's a ... device made to mimic birds. The eighth installment of a nine-part module has pupils read various articles to learn about bird flight. They consider the implications for aeronautical engineering.

The epicenter is the point on the ground above the initial point of rupture. The 10th lesson in a series of 20 encourages scholars to learn to triangulate the epicenter of an earthquake based on the arrival times of p waves and s...

There are underwater rivers that flow on the ocean floor thanks to a difference in density. Scholars learn about the density in both liquids and solids in the second lesson of an 11-part series. They then determine the density of water,...

How do satellites communicate? What types of satellites orbit Earth? Discover and mimic the way satellites communicate between two points in a hands-on activity that has pupils using mirrors, flashlights, and marbles.

Here's a perfect way to introduce perfect squares. Individuals color in the diagonals of squares and record observations about patterns. They connect their diagrams to exponents of two and perfect squares.

For many people, Barack Obama's presidency was the next step in Martin Luther King, Jr's dream of America's future. Explore the dreams of Americans past and present, as well as the young Americans in your class, with a set of activities...

There are a number of social, emotional, and physiological reasons why teenagers start smoking, and why they continue smoking into adulthood. Help class members understand why smoking begins in youth—and how to protect themselves from...

Your future is what you make it! Eighth graders launch their career searches in the first of six career and college readiness lessons. Scholars research to discover their extracurricular options both in and out of school, then locate...

Great literature discussions are a consequence of carefully crafted questions, interpretative questions that permit more than one response, and responses supported by specific evidence from the text. The discussion questions in a guide...