Curated OER
Happy Birthday Hans: How To Celebrate International Children's Book Day
Honor Hans Christian Andersen while encouraging young readers with enjoyable projects and activities.
Curated OER
Strategies to Build Comprehension Skills
Reading strategies that realy work. Here is an introduction of six active reading strategies to improve reading comprehension. Super helpful for newer teachers.
Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights
Vaclav Havel: Free Expression
Develop an understanding of universal human rights, particularly the freedom of expression, with the questions and activities that analyze the conflicts of Vaclav Havel. Learners define, interpret and rephrase the human rights article in...
Curated OER
Cultivate Active Reading Skills
Have class members try out these strategies to improve comprehension and engagement.
Curated OER
Instill Inherent Reading Strategies
Marking the text can help transform novice readers into experts and enrich the reading experience
Curated OER
Plagiarism: Avoiding Accidental Internet Plagiarism
Demonstrate how to cite information from Internet sources without plagiarizing. If your class is working on an Internet research paper, and you have observed learners cutting and pasting directly from the Internet, the activities and...
Curated OER
Sondheim: Voice of Cultural Change
Students explore Stephen Sondheim's contributions to musical theatre in the context of the dramatic cultural shift that occurred in American life in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
John F. Kennedy Center
Folktale Theatre
Introduce your middle schoolers to a performance and movement activity that uses their favorite stories from fairytales and folklore. They practice basic acting skills, create dialogues with a partner, and then as guided practice,...
Curated OER
Respect: Looks Like, Sounds Like, Feels Like
Sixth graders participate in a question and answer discussion on respect and then complete the "Planning to Use Respect" activity sheet. They describe the senses of a stuffed animal to their peers and assess how respect looks, sounds and...
Curated OER
Secret Life of Bees Research
The Secret Life of Bees provides high schoolers an opportunity to connect the events in the novel to events in America’s history. After choosing a topic from a provided list, individuals research how the event affected the Civil Rights...
Southern Nevada Regional Professional Development Program
Was Bias A Factor? Make an Argument
The ability to analyze an argument is a skill emphasized by the Common Core standards. Offer your class an opportunity to develop and hone their skills by providing them the testimonies in an Oregon court case. After reading the facts of...
Curated OER
Landscapes of the Mind
Students review Emily Dickinson's biography and examine themes and forms of some of her poems. They measure ways Graham integrates aspects of Dickinson's life and the themes and forms of her poetry into Letters to the World.
Curated OER
Reader's Theater: Presenting Asian Folktales
Learners, working in groups, rewrite Asian folktales as Reader's Theater scripts. Depending on grade level, they visit Websites and copy assigned stories. Students then perform their versions for classmates.
Curated OER
ABC Grammar Book
Elementary learners create an ABC grammar book. The project begins with class members taking digital pictures of items that begin with each letter of the alphabet. Depending on level, they then add a word or a complete sentence to...
The New York Times
Understanding the Mathematics of the Fiscal Cliff
What exactly is the fiscal cliff? What are the effects of changing income tax rates and payroll tax rates? Your learners will begin by reading news articles and examining graphs illustrating the "Bush tax cuts" of 2001 and 2003. They...
Curated OER
Monumental Conclusions
Fourth graders create a PowerPoint presentation comparing a "Grabless Conclusion" to a "Monumental Conclusion", using picture books.
Curated OER
Playing with Puns
"O pun" the door on this activity. Have your pupils compare the puns and word play in scenes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to those in Gary Blackwood’s The Shakespeare Stealer. Warm up and introductory activities, as well as...
Curated OER
Allies and Actions
How can we create “a more respectful, inclusive school community?" What can an individual do to make a member of an excluded or disrespected group feel more respected and included? What can the community do? Class groups record their...
Curated OER
ABC Yummy Treat Book
Students explore the letter sounds and the book, "ABC Yummy." They create a page including the letter, illustration, and sentence for a class ABC book.
Curated OER
Nouns in a Story
Young scholars, assessing a variety of formatting tools with Microsoft Word, utilize a bank of vocabulary words to make a personal dictionary of nouns. They classify nouns for people, places, things and ideas and separate them into...
Shakespeare in American Life
Tom Hanks and Caliban: Survivor Superstars
Here’s a clever way to combine language arts and social studies. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is believed to have been inspired by the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda in 1609. The class views a brief scene from Castaway in which Tom...
Channel Islands Film
Santa Cruz Island Restoration Narrative
What would you be willing to do to save an animal from extinction? After re-viewing a video about the restoration of the Island Fox on Santa Cruz Island, individuals adopt the point of view of one of the key players in the debate and...
Curated OER
Growing Pains of the Yearling
Fourth graders read The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
Curated OER
Body and Media Introduction
Students discuss body image as a group. They discover how the media affects how one sees their body. They analyze different media messages about this topic.