Curated OER
With Your Own Two Hands: Are You Changing the World or "Waiting for the World to Change"?
Can your pupils change the world? Explore this question with Ben Harper's song "With My Own Two Hands" and John Mayer's "Waiting for the World to Change." After listening to the songs, they discuss the tools at their disposal for...
Fluence Learning
Writing About Literature: What Is Happiness?
Jack London's heart for adventure has come to define the spirit of America and its frontier. Selected passages from the foreword The Cruise of the Snark take eighth graders through London's construction and voyage of his ship before...
Curated OER
Foreshadowing and Making Predictions
"What happens next?" Using real-life scenarios, movies, images, and other prompts, pupils practice making predictions based on inferences from clues. A SMART board activity takes them from making predictions to writing a prediction...
Curated OER
The Personal Narrative
After writing a personal narrative, learners edit their work and that of their classmates. Using the imbedded link, pupils edit their paper. They form small groups and check each other's papers for spelling, grammar usage, sentence...
Curated OER
Convince that Jury (Inspired by Roald Dahl's
What happened to a murder case when the police eat the murder weapon? After reading Roald Dahl's dark and ironic short story "Lamb to the Slaughter," students write a persuasive essay to convince a jury that the wife who killed her...
Roald Dahl
Fantastic Mr. Fox
A fancifully illustrated guide to Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, this series of lessons, activities, and tasks could be used in its entirety or picked apart and used piecemeal. Have young readers investigate the role of dialogue in...
Book Units Teacher
Skill Lessons – Prefixes and Suffixes
Sometimes the best way to understand a concept is to break it down. Young vocabulary pupils work with word parts in a hands-on activity that prompts them to connect flash cards with affixes to their root and base words....
Curated OER
Book Club Order
Young scholars complete a simulated book order form for their class. In this book club lesson, students budget and plan an order form for their fellow young scholars, discussing why they chose specific books.
Curated OER
Impersonating Great Poets Using "Science Verse" by Jon Scieszka
A great way to bring poetry and parody into your language arts classroom, this lesson mimics famous poems based on Jon Scieszka's Science Verse. The activity not only allows the class to see examples of poem parodies, but to create their...
Curated OER
Pre-Reading Preparation
Students research the English Renaissance era. In this research lesson, students complete this activity before reading the story The Prince and the Pauper to learn about the history. They pick topics and work in groups to research...
Film English
The Beauty of a Second
Add many seconds of beauty to your class with a short film and related project. The resource centers around a competition based on one-second segments of film, and the final compilation that came from the contest. Pupils identify...
Mississippi Department of Archives and History
Protesting Violence without Violence
The ultimate legacy of Emmett Till's violent death is its role in the non-violent roots of the Civil Rights Movement. A lesson compares contemporaneous articles with the lyrics of Bob Dylan's "The Death of Emmett Till" and prompts...
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Amazing Animals: English Language Development Lessons (Theme 4)
This packet, the second in the series of support materials for the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt thematic units on amazing animals, contains exercises and activities designed for the ESL/ELD classroom.
EngageNY
Grade 9 ELA Module 4, Unit 1, Lesson 8
In a close reading of "The Overseer" chapter from Sugar Changed the World, groups focus on the words Aronson and Budhos use to contrast the lifestyles of enslaved people and their enslavers. The whole class then engages in an...
Curated OER
Expanding Journal Writing Entries For Beginning Writers
First graders through a variety of strategies assess how to write in journals openly and effectively. Those strategies include integration of technology, story telling, group and team work, performance-based assessment/rubrics, visual...
Curated OER
Marvelous Mysteries
Fifth graders explore mystery stories. In this reading and writing lesson plan, 5th graders complete a planning guide for an original mystery. Students use the writing process to create a mystery story.
Curated OER
The Mail Race
Students create friendly letters and surveys to other schools. In this letter writing lesson, students format friendly letters to other school and request a reply. Students chart the replies on a map and share information from the...
Curated OER
Editing to Eliminate Fragments
Learners practice their writing skills. In this writing revision lesson, students read the provided writing samples and make corrections to the sentence fragments that are evident in each of them.
Curated OER
Writing a Personal Narrative
Students learn characteristics of an effective personal narrative. In this personal narrative instructional activity, students discover ways to show rather than tell, adding richness and detail to their writing. Students...
Curated OER
Cattle Drive
Students explore cattle drives. For this United States history and letter writing lesson, students write a letter to their family predicting possible problems that were encountered by participants in cattle drives. Students design...
Clark County School District
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen
A thorough lesson plan takes your first grade class through Jane Yolen's beautiful Owl Moon. It crafts the unit with clear objectives, high-level guiding questions, cloze activities and sentence frames, and extension...
MENSA Education & Research Foundation
It’s Greek to Me: Greek Mythology
It's no myth: this packet on Greek mythology is an excellent addition to your social studies curriculum. With writing activities, such as short answer responses and biopoems, and reading activities, which include creation stories and...
Trinity University
I Didn’t Know that was Poetry
Poetry or prose? That is the question facing middle schoolers as they begin a month-long poetry unit by examining the characteristics that differentiate poetry and prose writing. Pupils learn about poetic devices and different types of...
EngageNY
Summarizing Notes: Planning a Graphic Novelette Part 1: The Invention of Television
What's the story? Learners create the first of four storyboards about the invention of the television, incorporating narrative techniques and descriptive details. Next, they offer and receive feedback by participating in a peer critique...