"What are feelings?" and "Why are feelings important to understand?" are the essential questions of a lesson that boosts self-awareness. Scholars discuss the four basic emotions—happy, sad, scared, and mad—in preparation...

What city has the most consistent temperatures? Pupils use the mean and mean absolute deviation to describe various data sets including the average temperature in several cities. The 10th lesson in the 22-part series asks learners to...

Students explore the evolution from a pond habitat to a meadow.  In this habitat lesson, students become familiar with a beaver meadow habitat.  Students are aasigned an animal to research and find why the animal best survives...

Another awesome ASL instructional activity! Teach ASL to a special ed class, hearing impaired child, or for your own enrichment. This instructional activity provides comprehensible ASL language development. Each highlighted blue area...

A fun and quirky painting is analyzed for details in an art/literacy lesson. Youngsters look for colors, shadows, and details and then describe them using vivid language. They use the words from discussion to complete a fun Mad Lib-style...

What happens when a tenuous grasp on sanity begins to slip? Compare Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Emily Dickinson's "I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain" with a lesson plan focused on developing a common central idea. High...

How do complex characters develop throughout a text? Pupils read Act 5.1 from Shakespeare's Macbeth, which depicts Lady Macbeth's descent into madness. Using discussion and writing exercises, scholars analyze how Shakespeare develops...

Revenge, mortality, madness—what are the central ideas from Shakespeare's Hamlet? Scholars answer the question by writing multi-paragraph responses. They also identify and discuss literary devices from the play.

Students read an article at CNNfyi.com about Mad Cow disease. They identify and explain bovine spongiform encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. They formulate ways to combat mad cow disease.

Use a Mad-Libs like activity to create modern poetry! Writers will identify different words and their parts of speech and study "The Red Wheelbarrow" by Williams Carlos Williams. Then, use the sheets attached to craft your own poem! An...

The 11th lesson in the series of 22 is similar to the preceding lesson, but requires scholars to compare distributions using the mean and mean absolute deviation. Pupils use the information to make a determination on which data set is...

Being able to express feelings is important for every learner. ASL lesson 19 is intended for teaching hearing impaired pupils or special ed teachers functional ASL. Since this provides a list of signs describing feelings, it would be a...

Though this assignment may be thought madness, there is an actual method. Scholars perform a close reading of the original text of the soliloquies in Hamlet and modern translations to ensure they understand the speeches. They then select...

Perform operations to add, subtract, multiply and divide matrices. Then solve problems with vectors using matrices. A three day lesson: Matrix Madness, Mystical Matrices, and Decode the Encode. The last lesson has prizes that the class...

A great way to incorporate math into life science, this activity has learners measure migratory routes on a map and calculate the actual distance that shorebirds on the routes would cover. Learners compute the distance covered in both...

M&M's are always a great manipulative to use when teaching math. In this graphing lesson plan, learners predict how many of each color of M & M's there are. They count up each color and plug the data into a graph using the...

Whether the planks hide the beating of a hideous heart or they break away to the madness beneath, their presence makes itself known in the final instructional activity of a literary analysis unit. Having gathered textual evidence from...

Make up your mind to complete a lesson plan about "The Tell-Tale Heart" and forever rid yourself of simple sentence structures. As ninth graders analyze the first two paragraphs of Edgar Allan Poe's short story, they consider how text...

Eager readers have waited a long time, very patiently, for a set of literary analysis lessons that connect text structure to the work's central idea. As ninth graders continue reading "The Tell-Tale Heart," they focus on the central...

An engaging unit connects Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson's shared themes of madness and departure from reality. The 10th lesson in the unit explores Dickinson's figurative language and structure choices in "I Felt a Funeral, in my...

Hearken! and observe how well a literary analysis unit can help ninth graders read closely and connect text structure to a central idea. Focusing on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," learners take notes and track the development...

Madness, violence, despair—the titular character of Shakespeare's Macbeth is spiraling out of control. Pupils first explore the topic with a collaborative jigsaw discussion. At the end of the instructional activity, they write about how...

There's a fine line between madness and genius. Using the resource, scholars complete a mid-unit assessment based on their study of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. They write a multi-paragraph response, analyzing how two central...