Kenzuke's Kingdom is a wonderful adventure about a boy sailing around the world, it's also the focus of this lesson plan. Students read the novel as a class then use the Comic Life website to create a two-page comic based on the story....

Did you hear that? It's the main idea! Teach your class listening and note-taking strategies for determining the main idea by following the steps provided in this plan.

Anecdotes, analogies, testimonies, statistics. The most powerful arguments rely on multiple types of evidence. Scholars explore the topic as they read contrasting evidence about the benefits of video games. They complete Venn diagrams to...

Piece by piece ... Scholars read the text World without Fish by breaking the text into pieces. They identify challenging words and determine the gist of each section as they read. They then work together in triads to answer...

Explore the components of the African American celebration of Kwanzaa in the United States. Complete with learning objectives, a materials and preparation list, and eight days of lesson plans, the resource incorporates the principles of...

Fifth graders analyze photographs in order to write descriptively.  In this descriptive writing instructional activity, 5th graders use the Internet to research and view photographs of the arctic.  Students use descriptive...

Get your kids thinking about climate change with a series of activities that include creating a ditty box poem for the planet, a poem that identifies concepts or objects they would want to preserve.

The Nashua River serves as the focal point of an investigation of the treatment of and care for natural resources. A reading of A River Rand Wild: An Environmental History by Lynne Cherry, launches the study and class members consider...

Texture can really add to a work of art. Explore texture through observation and practice. Learners view and discuss works of art by M.C. Escher. They then create their own texture samplers with six different materials.

Help young learners understand friendship and empathy with two reading comprehension lessons. Each lesson focuses on a story about a child with autism, and encourages readers to compare and contrast the characters to each other and to...

Even supposed Utopian societies have their flaws. Using an educator's guide, individuals explore the society Ally Condie creates in Matched. Reflective writing prompts double as discussion questions and cover key themes in the novel, as...

Encourage learners to think critically about common myths regarding the Wampanoag Indians in Colonial America. They discover that behind every myth are many possible explanations—and that learning more about American history helps them...

Fifth graders write a speech.  In this history lesson, 5th graders define the word infamy and listen to a speech by FDR.  Students work in groups to summarize his speech and rewrite sections of the speech.

As part of a unit centered around a reading of Uglies, a 2005 young adult dystopian fiction novel by Scott Westerfield, Steven Cummings, and Devin K. Grayson, class members engage in an activity that asks groups to come to a...

Middle schoolers read two articles about the same event: "Plane from J.F.K Crashes off Canada" from the New York Times and "No Survivors from Crash of Swissair Jetliner Off Nova Scotia" from the Associated Press. They then compare the...

Are you looking for a way to teach sequence of events in your narrative writing unit? Bring this lesson to your middle school class, as it prompts young writers to create a narrative sequence map of events that have happened at school...

What are the important character traits of a good military leader? Individuals ponder this question before reading Orson Scott Card's science fiction novel, Ender's Game. After individuals rank a series of qualities,...

Although this is part of a series, lesson plan nine has your class take a break from their close study of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) text to read the firsthand account “Teaching Nepalis to Read, Plant, and...

A great way to practice with unit rates, the activity gives your mathematicians an opportunity to compare different statements and select which are true. They can practice with "choose all that apply" by setting each statement into its...

Teach children that just because something is old, doesn't mean you have to throw it away with a reading of Joseph Had a Little Overcoat by Simms Taback. Engaging children with an arts and crafts activity in which they patch the...

It's time to roll up those sleeves and get a little dirty in the second lesson plan of this series on the science of food. Investigate where plants and animals get the minerals they need to live in this two-part exploration of soil....

Twelfth graders complete research that exposes them to examples of nonviolent protest throughout the modern world. In this nonviolent protest research lesson, 12th graders discover information about signification nonviolent movements...

Pupils explore different cultures by researching holidays around the world, and comparing/contrasting their own customs to those of others; students then present their findings to the class.

Students identify an editorial and propaganda, discuss differences between weekly and daily newspapers, analyze needs of rural and urban newspaper audiences, and evaluate possible power of the press and importance of multiple views...