SStudents view examples of O'Keef's work and watch a video about her life. They use colored pencil to create a 6" x 6" reproduction of a 2" x 2" square cut from a magazine picture, finding and using the most interesting shapes in the...

Food takes a trip to the table. Class members choose a meal from a menu and calculate the total cost of the meal including tax and tip. Using a food origin card, pupils determine how far each of the ingredients of a meal traveled to end...

The New York Times Learning Network provides the resources that permit pupils to examine and then write and perform a fake news broadcast in the vein of “The Daily Show” or “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update. The generated reports...

Combines mathematical measurement with gardening skills. Third graders hunt for worms in the garden and try to find the longest one. They also measure and weigh vegetables that they harvest from the garden, measure rainfall amounts,...

Visit the Magic Treehouse and take your class on a trip through time with a reading of the children's book Mummies in the Morning. Using the story to spark an investigation into Egyptian culture, this literature unit engages...

What happens to your money between the time you make a bank deposit and the time you decide to spend it? Take middle schoolers and teens through the process of opening checking and savings accounts, creating a personal budget,...

Minimize the time it takes to create a fish dish. Scholars use their knowledge of time to devise an order that accounts for different constraints. Considering jobs that can be done in parallel is essential to solving the problem.

The last activity in a nine-part series has teams create a Google Earth map using the data they collected during a field trip. Using the map, groups analyze the results and make adjustments to the map to reflect their analysis. A short...

Make all the ratio representations fit together. The 15th segment in a series of 29 presents ratio problems to solve. Scholars use a variety of representations to respond to the questions. The problem set has pupils show how the...

Time to come clean! Scholars continue preparing the shampoo they created in the previous two lessons. The purpose of this stage is to calculate the perfect amount of additive to make the shampoo lather. 

Many have said home sweet home. However, what if home is in a prison? Cammie, a young girl in The Warden's Daughter, lives in the prison where her father works—and that is not even the toughest part of her life. Scholars read about...

Self reflection is an important skill to reinforce in our children, and it's especially helpful to help them realize who they are in the context of their environment. A collection of lessons about self image and community encourage...

Put your class in the shoes of someone - or something - else with this lesson, which encourages writers to keep a diary from the perspective of a living creature or an abstraction. Use Doreen Cronin's Diary of a Worm and the Six Trait...

Alphabet insects! Who has ever heard of such a thing? Get ready because your class is going to research insects that start with a specific letter of the alphabet. In small groups, they'll use the Internet and reference texts to locate...

Help young learners become active listeners and strong public speakers with a set of activities that range from paraphrasing, to discussions, and self-reflection. Additionally, the lessons address social media skills and non-verbal...

Combat cyberbullying with information. During this plan, learners watch a couple of videos, consider online behavior scenarios, brainstorm long- and short-term consequences, and discuss how to react to bullying in order to build up to...

Looking for an application for step functions? This activity uses real data to examine piecewise step functions. Groups create a list of data from varying scenarios and create a model to use to make recommendations to increase...

What do you do when you don't think you have enough information? You look for another way to do the problem! Pupils combine what they know about finding the area of a triangle and trigonometry to determine triangle area when they don't...

Forget your local meteorologist — build your own barometer and keep track of the weather with an activity that provides directions to build a barometer out of a narrow necked bottle, a glass, and some water. Using their barometer,...

How good is the fit? Using an interactive, classmates create a scatter plot of bivariate data and fit their own lines of best fit. The applet allows pupils to display the regression line along with the correlation coefficient. As a final...

To gain an understanding of how the Great Depression affected everyday citizens, class members examine letters written either to the president or to the governor of Alabama asking for assistance.

Thomas Jefferson lived a controversial life. A series of lesson plans shares information about Jefferson's Sons, a novel about the infamous founding father. Discussion questions and other tasks explore different points of view and cover...

Class members create a timeline of actions by both the British parliament and the colonists that led to the outbreak of the American Revolution. Groups use the provided Primary Source Analysis Tool to examine and...

All of the people in your class would agree that life would be different without the invention of the telephone! Study Alexander Graham Bell's most famous and influential invention through the primary source document of his...