Curated OER
What Is the Influence?
Students investigate propaganda techniques. In this media awareness lesson, students watch instructor-selected commercial clips and use the provided propaganda handouts to identify the propaganda techniques used in each of them.
Curated OER
Media in Research Multimedia Final Project
Students work cooperatively in groups to research a topic of their choice. They create a multimedia presentation of the information researched. Throughout the project they generate their own progress journals.
Virginia Department of Education
Writing Counterarguments
This activity is better utilized as a peer-editing exercise and not as an activity on how to write counterarguments. Writers take their argumentative rough drafts, peer edit in groups of four, and review the author on common essay...
Curated OER
Prisms-Turn Up The Volume
Identify the length, width, and height of prisms. Critical thinkers calculate the volume of prisms given small amounts of information. They derive the formula given the length, width and height.
Curated OER
Clifford's Big Idea: Be Responsible
Students become aware of how important it is to be responsible at home and school through meaningful reading and language experiences. In this Clifford Gets a Job lesson plan, students author their own booklet regarding responsibility at...
Dream of a Nation
Big6 Research Project
Do research projects at your school look like a class of eighth graders staring at a blank screen? Use the Big 6 research method to guide middle schoolers through the process of finding a topic, searching for and evaluating sources,...
Curated OER
Novel Character Study
Students complete a character study using a database to compile information from a novel. They design a five slide presentation highlighting the character's reaction to different situations in the book. They write an acrostic poem using...
Curated OER
Recognizing Propaganda/Bias
Middle and high schoolers examine the uses of propaganda during the Nazi era. Using examples of propaganda used by Hitler, they discuss how it changed the thinking and ideas of people exposed to it. In groups, they identify how and why...
Pulitzer Center
Peacebuilding: Taking Home Lessons Learned in Africa
Learners take a closer look at one journalist's work on UN Peacebuilding efforts in four African nations: Sierra Leone, Burundi, Central African Republic, and Guinea Bissau. They collaborate to define peacebuilding and discuss...
Curated OER
Gender Roles: Exposing Stereotypes
A series of activities help middle- and high-schoolers identify and explore gender stereotypes and how they can lead to violence and abuse. Use think-pair-share to activate whole class brainstorming about what it means to "be a man" and...
Newspaper Association of America
By the Numbers: Mathematical Connections in Newspapers for Middle-Grade Students
A cross-curricular resource teaches and reinforces mathematical concepts with several activities that use parts of a newspaper. Scholars use scavenger hunts to find the different ways math is used in the paper along with using data...
Curated OER
What's in the Time Capsule? A Technology-Connected Lesson Plan
Twelfth graders use computers and the Internet to research a specified area, word processors to prepare an essay, a digital camera, a video camera gather visuals, and a scanner to add visuals to a PowerPoint presentation as they discover...
Curated OER
Lesson Plan: A Guided Tour
Albert Bierstadt's painting Wind River Country shows viewers how a reader progresses through a story. Your class studies the light and dark areas, how the eye moves across the painting, and what attracts the audience to the work, and...
Curated OER
My Own Backyard
Students explore and react to the painting The Road to Santa Fe. For this interacting with art lesson, students locate various objects in the painting. Students copy the angle of objects by using their bodies. Students...
Denver Art Museum
Tea Gathering Quick-Write
Japanese tea gatherings are the inspiration for a great lesson. Learners are provided with an image of a tea caddy made for thick tea and asked to describe what they notice and what that might mean. This leads into a larger lesson about...
Denver Art Museum
Descriptive Haiku
Even though this is technically an art activity, haiku poetry is actually the main focus! Learners view photographs of Japanese tea caddies. They list five descriptive words for the caddies, then write haiku poems using the caddies as...
Conneticut Department of Education
Instructional Strategies That Facilitate Learning Across Content Areas
Imagine 28 instructional strategies, appropriate for all subject areas and all grade levels. Directed Reading-Thinking Activities (DRTA), Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) activities, KWL charts, comparison matrixes, classification...
Denver Art Museum
Putting Images into Words
Engage your class in art analysis of Indian Look-Alike by Melanie Yazzie. Using this work of art as inspiration, writers compose a poem or short story. After a peer review session, the teacher conveys information about the work of art as...
Curated OER
Fairy Tales
Students research the Internet using hotlists to find two different versions of a fairy tale after watching a teacher presentation of two versions of The Three Little Pigs. They design a PowerPoint presentation that shows the comparisons...
Curated OER
Western-Genre Films
High schoolers watch westerns and analyze them. They identify the plot, characters and the sounds in the film. They research icons of the American west and prepare a presentation. They share their presentation with the class.
Curated OER
ReReading America Lesson Three: Hands-on Practice
Students research, using a variety of sources, a topic that has been previously chosen. They evaluate their information for the value, relevance, and accuracy. Students identify problems in their research and writing to get assistance as...
Curated OER
Superbowl XXXVII Ads: Who Wins Here?
Students research what experts and viewers thought about the commercials shown during Super Bowl XXXVII, paying special attention to the reason ads very popular or not. Students prepare a notebook or a PowerPoint presentation on the Best...
Curated OER
The Art of Paraphrasing
Tenth graders participate in an activity in which they practice paraphrasing sections of primary and secondary documents. They are to share their paraphrasing with the class to help with their confidence speaking in front of a group.
Curated OER
Heirlooms
Students design a quilt square to reflect their special memory. For this family heirlooms lesson, students read The Patchwork Quilt and discuss the importance of family involvement in creating a family heirloom. Students write and...