"Friend, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears..." Those words begin one of the most persuasive speeches in literature. Explore the elements of persuasion in a series of lessons related to William Shakespeare's Julius...

Can you really knock the sense into someone? It seems that the bump on Billy's head changed his perspective on things in The Year of Billy Miller. Readers discover that after his injury, Billy appreciates his parents more and is nicer to...

Revive the art of letter writing with a project that enables class members to craft their own, personalized stationary. Young scholars add their name, address, and country to three different templates that features images of mythic...

Here is a laboratory exercise in which chemistry masters conduct an oxidation reaction to change ethanol into ethanal. They compare the original alcohol to the resulting aldehyde by forming a precipitate. This activity is aimed at...

A world without adjectives would be a sad place indeed! Make sure adjectives stay around by teaching your class about what they are and how using them can make a boring story truly interesting. Learners put this idea into practice by...

Honor the great poet, Shel Silverstein with eighteen activities and lessons showcasing his collection of poems from the book, Every Thing On It. Activities challenge scholars to rhyme words, make inferences, recite a poem, and...

Musical theater is a trifecta, requiring cast members to be actors, singers, and dancers. Help theater arts students develop these skills with a unit designed to prepare them for a staging of a musical.

I am dancing to the music in my head. Scholars learn to listen for music in their heads as they read literature and poems. After they identify and analyze poetic devices that relate to music, they create their own musical poems.

Young scholars conceive and create works of visual art that demonstrate comprehension of how the communication of their ideas relates to the media, techniques, and processes they use. They initiate, define, and solve challenging visual...

Students create a body portraits to depict their favorite things. In this self-expression lesson, students use drawings, paintings, and magazine clippings to fill in their life-size body portraits with pictures representing their...

In this body systems lesson, learners work in small groups conduct research to become an 'expert' on one of the 7 body systems. Students present their findings to the class via power point, poster, or song.

Students compose songs about recycling. In this ecology lesson, students use vocabulary and concepts related to recycling to generate lyrics for an original song. Students construct musical instruments out of discarded materials.

Fourth graders research famous Americans from the Westward Movement and complete an interview. In this Westward Movement lesson, 4th graders work in pairs to research someone who was important during this time period. They prepare and...

Eighth graders gather and use information on a chosen topic for a hypothetical research paper. They use organizational features of printed text, the Internet, and other media to locate information and choose a specific topic.

High schoolers study Asian works of art and Japanese haiku. They then take this knowledge and create an original haiku in response to other works of art.

In this using everyday objects for artwork worksheet, student find objects with repetition and pattern, read and follow directions, use the patterns with tempera paint to create stamp art, and use the stamps to create a story. Students...

In this story starter worksheet, students read the prompt written inside each gingerbread man shape and complete the story. Each starter is printed on a separate page; all are holiday or winter related.

Readers reflect on enjoyable stories they know, brainstorm criteria that make a story "good," analyze a New York Times article about innovative children's performances, re-envision classics on their own, and peer edit drafts. Use this as...

Got a rainy day and need a few fabulous activities to foster creative thinking skills? The class works to understand the three types of human power; direct, indirect, and stored. They do this by first creating a parade float like the...

A 55-page unit examines the novel, The BFG, by Roald Dahl. Six lessons pay close attention to friendship, dreams, and believing themes while analyzing interesting characters, writing creative vocabulary, smilies, metaphors, an exciting...

Kids consider revolution as a basis for creativity, art, and storytelling. After reading an excerpt from the book, Persepolis, learners choose one event from any world revolution to write about. They storyboard the event focusing on...

Using a creative method for presenting the information, this resource explores identifying and writing fractions. It is colorful and straightforward. As a way to introduce and then practice fractions, this is a wonderful resource. There...

Make critical and creative thinkers out of your class, with an archeology-based project they'll love. They start the activity by first researching what archeologists do, then they generate a list of the qualities archeologists need...

Young scholars brainstorm all the possible scenarios that would help them tell a story in detail with the whole class and with partners. They create web outlines to create a name story and then illustrate it with creative grammar usage...