Students read "I Had a Hero" a memoir written by a Peace Corps volunteer serving in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They discuss the story, respond to it in writing, complete comprehension activities and relate the account to their own...

Johnson C. Montgomery’s controversial plea for American social isolationism, “The Island of Plenty,” launches an in-depth study of the structure and logic of the essay. After responding to a series of questions, individuals craft a...

A complex question looking for the total cost of a stained glass window by calculating area and circumference of a circle. With detailed components, this activity will challenge your designers to figure out if they have enough money to...

Graphs, functions, symbols, and more! Use these strategies to model everything from the flow of a river to the number of cars passing a toll booth. Presented differently but solved similarly, learners consider five different scenarios...

The class gets their mean and median all in a row with an assessment task that uses a population of ducklings to work with data displays and measures of central tendency. Pupils create a frequency chart and calculate the mean and median....

Put the better archer in a box. The performance task has pupils compare the performance of two archers using box-and-whisker plots. The resource includes sample responses that are useful in comparing individuals' work to others.

Just what does it take to show two rhombuses are similar? The assessment task asks pupils to develop an argument to show that given quadrilaterals are rhombuses. Class members also use their knowledge of similar triangles to show two...

Adolescence is a tumultuous time for the learners in your class. Guide them through the rocky world of friendships, risks, personal health, and emotional turmoil with a set of lessons about teenager relationships and sexuality.

Can a cat have 2,000 descendants in 18 months? To determine if this claim is realistic, individuals must take different pieces of information into account when justifying their responses.

Don't stuff money under your mattress. To find out why learners first complete a task determining how $24,000 in cash would affect the height of a mattress and whether this same amount would fit into a suitcase of given dimensions....

Salmonella poisoning impacts over 200,000 people in the United States each year. Scholars learn about the growth of these bacteria using multiple approaches. Then they apply the same growth calculations to endangered species and think...

Your young boaters will enjoy writing and solving inequalities, and representing the solution graphically in this task set in the context of renting a boat.

This is great go-to activity for those spring or fall days when the weather beckons your geometry class outside. Learners start with a small tree, devising strategies to accurately estimate the leaf count. They must then tackle the...

How do scientists identify which elements originate from meteorites? Scholars learn about a sample of material found in a remote location, analyzing the sample to determine if it might be from Earth or not. They study elements, isotopes,...

It's assessment time! Determine your young mathematicians' understanding of elapsed time with this brief, five-question quiz.

Designers in Prague are not diagonally challenged. The mini-assessment provides a complex pattern made from blocks. Individuals use the pattern to find the area and perimeter of the design. To find the perimeter, they use the Pythagorean...

The class braids irrational numbers, Pythagoras, and perimeter together. The mini-assessment requires scholars to use irrational numbers and the Pythagorean Theorem to find perimeters of rugs. The rugs are rectangular, triangular,...

Teach your class to think outside the box. Scholars use the concept of equality to solve a problem in the assessment task. They determine how to use a scale to identify the one box out of a set of nine boxes that is heavier than the others.

Did you know that modern Chinese literature “grew from the psychoanalytical theory of Sigmund Freud”? Designed for a world literature class, seniors are introduced to “One Evening in the Rainy Season,” Shi Zhecun’s stream of...

When told to describe a line, do your pupils list its color, length, and which side is high or low? Use a worksheet that engages scholars to properly label line graphs. It then requests two applied reasoning answers.

The mean might not always be the best representation of the average. The assessment task has individuals determine the measures of center for the salaries of a company. They determine which of the three would be the best representation...

A PowerPoint and an accompanying worksheet introduce young meteorologists to the hole in the ozone layer. Another handout provides a coloring and graphing activity which examines the changes in the ozone. There are also links to...

Parallelograms are pairs of triangles all the way around. Pupils measure to determine the area and perimeter of a parallelogram. They then find the area of the tirangles formed by drawing a diagonal of the parallelogram and compare their...

Enough stuffed crust to go around. Pupils calculate the area and perimeter of a variety of pizza shapes, including rectangular and circular. Individuals design rectangular pizzas with a given area to maximize the amount of crust and do...