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Using Artifacts to Engage Students in Critical Thinking Activities
Creating learning centers with artifact-related activities are a great way to promote deductive reasoning and critical thinking skills.
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The Grapes of Wrath: Scrapbooks and Artifacts
Students interpret historical evidence presented in primary and secondary sources. In this Great Depression lesson, students read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and use ethnographic research processes...
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The Díne (Navajo) Native American Tribe
Students participate in a variety of activities to become familiar with the Navajo Indians. In this Díne (Navajo) Native American tribe lesson, students understand where the Navajo tribe lived and find them on a map. Students discuss the...
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Pharaoh Phonetics
Learners explain the purpose of hieroglyphics and identify their role in communicating ideas. They research the history of writing and it's significance in ancient Egyptian life and identify the components of hieroglyphics.
Council for Economic Education
Cost/Benefit Analysis: Three Gorges Dam
Learners, in groups, take various roles in evaluating the costs/benefits of the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River in China.
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Activity: Polymer Clay Millefiori Cane Beads
Students show an understanding of how millefiori beads are constructed by making some in several styles in polymer clay. They view images and techniques on a website imbedded in this plan and then attempt to make their own.
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Helping the Adolescent Cope with Family Life
Students are introduced to the proper ways to deal with conflict at home. In groups, they define family based on what it means to them and identify factors that lead to a breakdown in communications. They participate in role-playing...
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Research Project
Learners explore Chinese New Year, complete a cyber hunt, and write a report which includes pictures, using the information they found.
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Lewis and Clark: The Language of Discovery
Students replicate some of the trailblazing methods of Lewis and Clark on a fifteen-minute "writing journey" through the school or neighborhood.
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Animal Encounters
Students use their visualizing and interpreting skills to produce original writings and artwork.
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How Things Fly
Students observe photographs of selected twentieth-century aircraft at the National Air and Space Museum and note differences in the design of aircraft wings, fuselages, and engines.
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How Things Fly
Students, by drawing on their own experiences, discuss and examine the basic physics of flight. They participate in a variety of activities regarding flight.
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Stories of the Wrights' Flight
Students examine and compare primary and secondary source accounts of the Wright brothers' first flights on December 17, 1903.
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Money Talks
Students move from fact finding to interpretation as they examine paper money from the time of the American Revolution. In the final exercise, they use the issue dates of the bills to construct a chronology of political changes during...
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Pictures Telling Stories
Students see the importance of primary sources in the study of history, but also the limitations of relying only on primary sources of taking the money, as it were, at face value.
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The Rocky Shore
Students compare a realistic landscape painting with a photograph of the same place.
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Spy on a Spider
Students view slides or live specimens to name and describe the distinguishing features of groups of arthropods, especially spiders and insects. They complete worksheets, observe webs and then search for and record where spiders can be...
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Creatures from Planet X: Spiders
Students are given a description of some fascinating animals from "Planet X". They follow the descriptions given to illustrate one of these animals paying careful attention to introduced vocabulary such as 'appendages', 'receptors', and...
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Facts, Feats and Folklore: Spiders
Students review and discuss a variety of sayings, folklore and superstitions about spiders. They discuss this information and choose either an interesting fact or appealing foklore tradition to illustrate.
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Letters from the Japanese American Internment
Students make deductions about life in an internment camp by reading and comparing letters written to Clara Breed. Along the way, they consider the advantages of looking at a historical event from the multiple points of view of...
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Methods of Collecting Information
Third graders examine a bag or box of soil containing items that they dig for. Their task is to become detectives to make conclusions about the area from which the items came as real archaeologists do.
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American Prehistory: 8000 Years of Forest Management
Students discuss the first people to live in North America and the types of evidence we have of their existence. They complete a set of worksheets and explore their answer in group discussions.
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If the World Was a Village...Examining Ethnocentrism
Seventh graders examine their own perceptions of world's people, compare those perceptions to real demographic data, provide definition and understanding of term "ethnocentrism," and examine their own ethnocentrism based on comparison of...
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We Arrived 10,000 Years Ago...
Pupils explain ways that humans migrated from Asia and settle in the Americas. In this investigative lesson students participate in a brief archaeological demonstration and review what they learned.