Do you have an energy hog in your home? Individuals pick at least one room at home to determine the amount of energy the appliances consume. Using that information, pupils fill out a worksheet to determine the cost of running each...

Looking to introduce some text-based questions into your ELA lessons? Practice the kinds of skills the Common Core demands with the seven text-based questions and the essay prompt provided here. Designed to be a three-day lesson, day one...

Write with the senses! Try using art to inspire writers to consider all of the senses. Here, the class is divided in half. Each group looks at one of two images, imagines the senses that would be engaged, and records answers to five...

A great resource for your unit on Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Small groups conduct research about related topics (list included), write papers, present PowerPoint slide shows, and take a student-created test. Fill in a few...

Grrrrr, gargoyles are on the loose! Young artists are familiarized with the history of gargoyles, examine pictures of them, and hear a story about them. Then, they draw a gargoyle and write down exactly how they did it (procedural...

Build understanding of theme with an activity designed for The Cay and the Common Core. Small groups or pairs use graphic organizers to determine themes, find and record related details from the text, and formulate theme statements. In...

Connect Martin Luther King Jr's famous speech, "I Have a Dream," to The Cay by Theodore Taylor. Taylor refers to the speech in his dedication, which creates a natural segue into talking about the speech and how it relates to the novel....

What tools do archaeologists and anthropologist use to learned about what life was like in the past. After watching West of The West's documentary Once Upon a Time that details how scientists use artifacts to establish a...

Improve high schoolers' public speaking with an engaging activity. Class members select three personally relevant quotes from a list. They then write a short speech for each quote, explaining how the quotes are personally relevant....

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life” and an excitement that comes with finding a good teaching resource. Included in a richly detailed packet designed to accompany The Call of the Wild, are a tableaux exercise, a...

Have fun with history and turn your kids into news reporters of the past. Each group will research, script, and deliver a news report on a historic event they are studying in class. They'll identify the main characters of the historical...

All cultures express similar thoughts, feelings, and ideas. But, often times those things are expressed differently. Learners compare and contrast traditional dances from two cultures. They watch videos of each performance, stop to...

How far would your pupils go to be able to have access to books? Revisit Heather Henson and David Small's That Book Woman and challenge class members to take on the role of Cal or the Book Woman. By putting themselves in someone else's...

Read a sample of creative descriptive writing to your science class. Discuss how writing can be used to record and communicate observations that scientists make. Reading selections and thought-provoking questions are suggested. Also...

To truly teach through the arts means one must tackle both art and core content in one lesson. This quick activity does just that. Learners make skeletons out of cotton swabs in order to study relief sculpture and the skeletal system....

Encourage your artists to go wild with their color choices in this fun art lesson. Similar to the pop art by Andy Warhol, your class will color ordinary black and white photos with vibrant colors to simulate photo tinting. What a fun way...

Middle schoolers will paraphrase a resource without plagiarizing. Then rewrite after reading text. They then evaluate the site or reference they are using for accuracy. In the end, they complete a note-taking organizer.

Children can learn to analyze expository or informational texts at nearly any age. This scaffolded and scripted resource provides teachers with the support needed to facilitate a thoughtful lesson on summarizing informational text...

Do your young readers have difficulty visualizing what they read? Although the activity described here is for The Call of the Wild, the strategy could be used with any narrative. At the conclusion of each chapter of Jack London’s novel,...

Eight different numbers are listed for mathematics masters to analyze. They simply tell if each number is rational or irrational. They can also explain their reasoning. A simple and straightforward instructional activity that is a handy...

Why are Torrey pines only found in La Jolla, California and on Santa Rosa Island? Class members examine images of Torrey pines from these two locations, noting the similarities and differences, and then develop a demonstration model that...

Garbage, recycle, compost: Does it really matter where we put our trash once we are done? By making detailed observations over seven weeks, kids will see which materials break down naturally to become a healthy part of the soil, and...

Learners discuss their personal connections with stories they've read in the past and identify techniques to connect with more stories. They create illustrations, construct task cards, and complete sentence stems based on books they read...

Although the article that launches this instructional activity is about the history of the Periodic Table, the objective is reading comprehension. Using the eight-page informational text, learners answer five comprehension questions and...