Read the story Green Eggs and Ham to practice phonemic awareness, rhyming, and writing skills with emerging readers. They will match oral words to printed words, create a graphic organizer, and the use rhyming words in an...

NASA is planning a journey to Mars, and current scholars could very well be a part of a future mission. During the unit, pupils research the advances in space exploration and knowledge about the universe. Then they work in groups to...

Middle schoolers complete a writing assessment task to demonstrate their ability to craft a narrative based on a variety of informational texts. They view West of the West's documentary Magic Isle, read three print resources about...

Acquaint your class with informational text through a close reading. First, examine a couple of pages together, looking at text features and content. The whole class focuses on marking down a brief summary of each paragraph before...

W.W. Jacobs' story "The Monkey's Paw" provides plenty of foreshadowing which readers use to make predictions in this tightly composed, sound instructional plan. Your class reads the story, recording predictions and checking for veracity...

Expose your class to Waiting for the Biblioburro, narrative nonfiction that will act as the bridge between ficiton and informational texts to come. Class members do a close reading of the text, looking at excerpts instead of the whole...

A discussion of the Supreme Court’s Opinion of Tinker v. Des Moines generates a discussion of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. Although the key elements of this instructional activity are based on a video that is not included,...

After watching Treasure in the Sea, a documentary about Channel Islands National Park and the video First Contact, about the voyage of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo to the Channel islands, groups research and then compare the...

Groups of learners research a city in Arkansas, then plan and create a brochure which would promote business growth in that city. The groups access the Internet in order to find out the necessary information about the town to put in...

After watching West of the West's documentary on Catalina Island, The Magic Isle, class members research how Walt Disney's and William Wrigley's different visions impacted the island.

The poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the focus of a unit that asks readers to consider how an artist's life and changes in society influences his or her work. After careful study of Whitman's and Dickinson's perspectives on...

Scholars scour thematically aligned texts to gather a bank of words they can use in an original acrostic poem. 

Why do readers need to know an author’s purpose? How do you figure out what that purpose is? Guide your pupils through a series of activities that show them how to identify various techniques and structures used in persuasive writing....

Learning to craft quality questions is a skill that can be taught. Class members use the Question Formulation Technique to learn how to create and refine both closed-ended and open-ended questions. They then view West of the West's...

Plagiarism, copyright, and fair use are the focus of a three-part instructional activity designed to inform scholars of how to properly cite others' work. First, pupils use a KWL chart to begin thinking and...

Class members will dig this activity that has them trying their hand at recovering artifacts. Groups are assigned a section of a sandbox, carefully uncover the artifacts in their section, and then develop theories about who might...

After watching West of the West's documentary The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, class members imagine how Juana Maria/Karana may have felt about living alone on the island for 18 years and craft a blackout poem or a narrative in...

What was the most significant tool used by the Chumash? How did the environment make the tool possible? What group behaviors allowed the Chumash be be successful for thousands of years? After watching West of the West's documentary Once...

Enlighten young consumers to advertising techniques aimed specifically at their generation. Have learners answer questions about how advertisements are geared for a younger audience, then have them practice selling to other teenagers....

The options are vast with this Ancient Greece and Olympics research project! Using Scholastic online resources, historians have interactive and educational supports to guide them through researching and writing about the 2004 Olympics in...

Students react to statements about the moon, then read a news article about NASA's plans to build a permanent base on the moon. In this space science and current events lesson, the teacher introduces the article with a discussion and a...

Explore gender stereotypes by analyzing how male and female characters are depicted in comic books. Using the provided Comic Book Analysis sheet, students record the attributes of male and female comic book characters. Then the whole...

Scapegoating and "Othering" is the focus of a series of activities that ask groups to consider how these behaviors contribute to hatred and intolerance. Groups are given a scenario and discussion questions based on the situation. Whether...

Few topics engage young mathematicians as much as learning about money. Through a series of shared readings and hands-on activities, children explore the US currency system, learning how to count money and calculate change as they create...