Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" serves as an exemplar for a mini-lesson on semicolons. Working alone or in small groups, class members first circle all the semicolons in the letter, and then consider how this...

Wearing wrinkled clothing and chewing gum are two things not to do at an interview. Pupils discover the steps to an effective job interview with the informative lesson plan. They read a sample interview and then practice their...

The fourth standard for reading literature in the Common Core calls for young readers to be able to determine the figurative and connotative meanings of words and phrases. Use this resource, a continuation of a series of Common Core...

Two activities look at how rumors are spread and ways class members can stop them. The first activity brings forth an in-depth conversation about how reporters gather information to write articles and how students can implement the same...

Writers compose an original found poem by searching for words that inspire them. Words are taken from everyday conversation, books, cut from magazines, the mail, or an already written poem. 

A tea party in Wonderland? An East Egg brunch with Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and Nick? Breakfast with Miss Havisham, Lady Macbeth, and Abigail Williams? Or dinner with Andre, Hamlet, and Randle Patrick McMurphy? Class members select a favorite...

Explore ocean habitats with a lesson that showcases the home of manatees and loggerhead turtles in Belize. Here, pupils compare and contrast the homes of ocean animals to those of humans, listen to an original short story about...

What would change in your daily life due to a power outage? Here, learners explore the inventions brought to us by the one and only, Thomas Edison, and imagine a day without them. Scholars take part in a grand conversation and write a...

An informative list compiled with quotes, authors, and discussion questions, along with 20 out-of-the-box application ideas, make up the collection of lessons geared to spark dialogue and creative thinking about quotations. 

Can you create a poem without writing a word! With found poetry, you can! Practice one version of found poetry with a lesson on book spine poems. Learners create poems by stacking books and reading the lines created by their spine titles.

Students make a handprint underneath a Valentine poem to give to their parents. In this Valentine poem lesson plan, students also glue conversation hearts around the edge of the page for a border.

The incredibly shrinking meter—decimeters to centimeters, to millimeters, and now to nanometers! Learners may have a difficult time visualizing particles on a nanoscale. Help them see a little clearer using a well-designed lesson...

Chart your way to an understanding of nanoscale. Using a Google map, learners estimate a radius around their location of 1,000 and 1,000,000 meters. Predicting what 1,000,000,000 meters would look like takes them off the charts!...

Here's an awesome unit that uses The Cay as the anchor text. The 16-page packet is loaded with teaching ideas, activities, and suggested adjustments.

Don't let your eyes play tricks on you ... use scale to keep your eyes in check! Young scholars observe images without scale and try to identify the structure. Then, they look at the same image with a scale bar and assess whether their...

This conversation activity uses 1-2 decks of playing cards to prompt discussion: each card represents a specific question. The site provides instructions and a suggested list of questions to match each card.

A listening comprehension exercise designed for native Spanish speakers learning English. Students listen to a short conversation about class schedules and then answer questions based on what has been heard. Instructions are in Spanish....

This site for Spanish-speaking English language learners. Students listen to a short dialog between two students who discuss their new class schedules. Presented in both written and auditory formats, students answer comprehension...