Fourth graders study women's involvement in Texas politics. In this US history instructional activity, 4th graders discuss woman suffrage, examine three Texas female pioneer legislators by reading biographies, and explore women's issues...

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...

N.B.. cit., n.b., viz., sc., inf. e,g,—these abbreviations frequently appear in academic papers and on works cited lists, but what do they mean? Part of a larger series to improve writing skills, the handout on Latin terms and...

Have your middle schoolers define the terms outline, summary, paraphrase, plagiarism, citation, reference, and bibliography. They identify the main ideas, topic sentence, supporting ideas in technical writing and create note cards using...

As learners continue to examine a short story of their choice, they take some time to look at analysis completed by others on the same story. In the eleventh lesson in a series of fourteen, pupils explore various sites for literary...

In this skimming exercise worksheet, students quickly read a passage about reverse culture shock to find main ideas. Students have a short time period to read the text and identify the main ideas.

Pupils practice the strategy of summarization to be able to understand and comprehend the text. They study how to get rid of unnecessary or repeated information and find the most important items or events and then write a statement...

What fun! As part of a vocabulary exercise designed for Victor Martinez's Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida readers create word trees with the trunk representing the root word and the branches representing prefixes that can be added to the...

Reading fairy tales is so much fun! Learners use dramatic play to assist them in defining and expressing the main theme found in the story of Cinderella. Each group is given a story card and will create a tableau based on the main point...

Read like a writer. Scholars read a model literary analysis in preparation for a similar writing assignment before annotating each paragraph for the gist. Next, pupils devise a list of qualities of a strong literary analysis essay. 

Teaching tools designed to support student-centered literature study. Geared toward homeschoolers reading Harper Lee's book To Kill a Mockingbird, I would use these in my classroom. The materials are applicable to any text: graphic...

What was life like in colonial America? Follow this lesson and your pupils will find out what people in colonial times did for work and for fun. Ask learners to compare and contrast the two texts and explain what the reading helped them...

A study of Alfred Noyes's poem "The Highwayman" opens a lesson about narrative poetry. Scholars read the poem and compare it to the animated video version using a worksheet. Learners look at models and use a template to craft an "I Am"...

Put young grammarians to the test with an activity about adverbs. A five-paragraph passage prompts kids to find the adverbs and circle them, noting their purpose in context.

Middle schoolers read and review informational texts, analyze cause and effect, and distinguish fact from opinion. They assess a "one-minute mystery" you read aloud for cause and effect relationships. Resource includes complete set of...

“Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.” Mary Alice, the fifteen-year-old narrator of A Year Down Yonder, is forced to leave Chicago and spend a year with her Grandma Dowdel in a small rural...

The Secret Garden, is a wonderful book to read with your class. After reading, why not employ the lesson plan presented here as a follow up activity? In it, pupils create character charts that portray the tremendous changes that...

Review concepts and terms after reading Running Out of Time. Learners each come up with a few terms that they think are important and then participate in a list-group-label exercise, paying close attention to the two main years featured...

Using methods adopted by Public Policy Analysts (PPA) class groups define a social problem, gather evidence to document the existence of the problem, identify causes, evaluate existing policies designed to deal with the problem, develop...

Art, music, poetry, and the beauty of the seasons is what you'll find in this very nice unit idea. You can use any of the suggested books and activities to engage your second graders in an exploration of the changes that take place...

Get the facts straight. Scholars complete their mid-unit assessment by reading a text, watching a video, and observing a picture about howler monkeys. They take notes about the facts they discover to use in future lessons.

Students practice the reading strategy of summarization skills by picking out main events or ideas while reading a chapter in a book. They interact with the article, "SuperCroc," from National Geographic for Kids magazine to summarize...

Third graders summarize a selected piece of nonfiction text. After reviewing the correct way to use a Venn diagram, 3rd graders read a nonfiction article. They write a summary paragraph using their Venn Diagram and the five-step process...

Students choose novels to read in an open reading forum.