The New York Times article “Lessons in Internet Plagiarism,” launches a look at how the Internet has increased the prevalence of plagiarism. The richly detailed lesson includes warm-up and wrap-up activities, discussion questions,...

Inspire critical thinking with this activity, which prompts students to compare lesbian, gat, bisexual, and transgender rights with the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By collecting topical articles about...

Students identify and assess the impact of unions on workers, management, and community. They listen to radio stories, students are asked what can they conclude about the impact of unions on the lives of the workers, management, and...

This detailed overview of a curriculum unit suggests using travel literature to engage and stimulate your third graders’ interest in reading. The suggested reading list includes fiction and non-fiction materials and offers urban children...

Examine the differences between totalitarianism and democracy in this writing lesson. Using the same format and theme from Great Expectations, young writers work in pairs to compose their own short stories. They follow guidelines for the...

High schoolers create a scrapbook of college student life during the 1960's using digital archives and Internet research. They read and discuss the article "What's the Matter With College?" and then compare college experience of today...

Create an expert guide to local businesses in this lesson. Through research, young readers consider their local businesses and the services they provide, paying attention to any conflicting information they might find. Working in groups,...

In this reading worksheet, learners answer 10 multiple-choice questions about the book. For example, "What happened to the very first edition of the Laundry News?"

Use this worksheet to research a future or past olympian. There's a space for researchers to brainstorm things they'd like to know, a space for them to record notes, and a KWL chart. There's also an open space to write a cumulative...

Amateur poets explore alphabetical poetry. They choose a topic and brainstorm vocabulary that relates to the topic using each letter of the alphabet. The class then generates ideas for a group alphabet poem. After creating one as a whole...

Middle schoolers read and review informational texts, analyze cause and effect, and distinguish fact from opinion. They assess a "one-minute mystery" you read aloud for cause and effect relationships. Resource includes complete set of...

Research milestones from the past century. Transportation milestones have changed society, the economy, communication, and travel. Pupils research these changes in order to create a transportation exhibit showing the enhancements in...

Study unusual punctuation marks in this punctuation lesson plan. Young grammarians work in small groups to research one of the unusual punctuation marks (semi-colon, colon, dash, comma, ellipses, or quotation marks) and discuss how the...

After reading an interesting article comparing the disputed presidential election of 1877 to a similar event in the year 2000, kids blog a response. They read the article, check out the embedded links, then respond to four related...

Narrative or expository? That is the question readers face on a two-part comprehension worksheet that asks kids to read a short passage about these two different types of writing, and then to answer a series of comprehension questions...

A series of activities help middle- and high-schoolers identify and explore gender stereotypes and how they can lead to violence and abuse. Use think-pair-share to activate whole class brainstorming about what it means to "be a man" and...

Although young scholars are aware of news as information that influences their perceptions of the world, they are often unaware of the various ways to present that information. Encourage them to investigate, discuss, analyze and make...

How can news coverage be made more accessible for teens? Model for your class how to use technology to annotate news stories containing unfamiliar references that hinder their interest in and understanding of a news story. Use the...

Your budding readers know what it's like to get to a word and think, "What does that mean?" Expand their vocabulary in context using Christopher Mitten's nonfiction picture book Firefighters. Get them ready by pre-teaching the new...

A class newsletter? The possible extensions for this activity are endless. After examining examples of news print-outs from hotels or workplaces, class members develop their own articles and produce a newsletter. A great way to keep...

Fourth and fifth graders define the term media literacy, then come up with examples that they share with the class. The types of media studied are auditory, visual, and written. Learners get together in pairs and perform a media...

Get your junior high writers stimulated with the strategies and ideas available in this activity. Learners discuss and debate controversial subjects, and outline their reasons with an online graphic organizer (link included) that creates...

If you are reading works by Walter Dean Myers in your class, this resource might be worth a look. Included here are activities and discussion questions for Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary, Somewhere in the Darkness, Scorpions, Fallen...

Provide parents with the tools they need to bridge the summer learning gap with this collection of fun activities. Whether it's creating an alphabet poster with illustrations for each letter, playing a game of sight word concentration,...