Explore emotions associated with moving to a new home with young learners. First they listen to the books Painted Words/Spoken Memories by Aliki and Going Home by Eve Bunting. Then they are invited to share their experiences as well as...

A good story is a great way to support skills that are necessary for encouraging strong reading skills. Here is a class I do, You do, We do style lesson that stars the tale, Ming Lo Moves the Mountain. Included are two fun pre-reading...

How can you tell if someone is happy? The lesson works with elementary and middle school scholars to activate their schema and pay attention to details to make inferences in their daily lives, poetry, and other literature. Cleverly...

Second graders explore floating and sinking and make predictions about whether certain objects are likely to sink or float. They read the story Who Sank the Boat? by Pamela Allen. Pupils loacate rhyming words and discuss the events of...

Aspiring writers complete and discuss fill-in-the-blank cliché expressions, define cliché as a form of predictable writing, take cliché expressions and turn them into new, unpredictable ones, read poetry that illustrates writer's use of...

Fourth graders examine pumpkins and use the scientific method to explore its contents.  In this Pumpkin Science lesson, 4th graders measure pumpkins for circumference. Students dress as if they were in a lab and work in pairs to...

"What are Henry's options?" "What do you think Henry will do?" To better understand the central conflict for the main character in Robert Cormier's Tunes for Bears to Dance to, class members engage in a compare-and-contrast activity that...

Each page of a comprehension packet that accompanies James and The Giant Peach requires learners to think, comprehend, focus on characters, make text-to-self and text-to-world connections, and build vocabulary through context....

Students play a game of questioning with the teacher after reading silently a beginning passage of text. They and teacher request specific information from each other until students are able to summarize and predict the outcome of the...

Learners predict when an object will float or sink based on comparison of density of the object to the density of the substance in which it is placed. The access a website and sketch the object in the first column of their table and then...

Do figures of speech enhance a play or story? In small groups, learners locate and describe figures of speech they find while reading a reader's theater play. After making predictions, they describe how the figures of speech make the...

Get your junior oceanographers to generate tidal prediction graphs on an interactive website. They will feel like experts in the field, or shall we say, experts in the ocean! This is a brief, but worthwhile activity that could be used to...

How do you create a residual plot? Work as a class and in small groups through the activity in order to learn how to build a residual plot. The activity builds upon previous learning on calculating residuals and serves as a...

Young scientists build their own electromagnet and test it by picking up paperclips. Analysis questions evaluate knowledge at the end of the activity. 

Abracadabra! Provide your class with the tools to perform a chemical "magic show" as they predict the charges of various ions, determine ionic compound formulas, and make observations to determine when a chemical reaction between...

Looking for an estimation activity a bit more involved than the typical "guess the number of jellybeans in the jar" game? Here, learners use a picture to estimate the number of people at a large event, look for potential problems with...

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...

Third graders practice making predictions about weather from conditions they observe on weather instruments and weather reports. Learners are introduced to the most basic weather reporting instruments: the thermometer, the wind vane, the...

Youngsters complete a unit of lessons based on the story "Little Miss Muffet." They predict what will happen in the story, and use context clues to look for meaning in the words. They research information about spiders using the Internet...

Explore expressive reading through the read-aloud Summertime: From Porgy and Bess. Readers will make predictions about the text and listen to the song Summertime. They will also identify how the story relates to the song lyrics.

First graders explore the theme of dental health and hygeine. They make tooth loss predictions, count lost teeth, and graph tooth loss. In addition, they listen to dental health stories, read online stories, create spreadsheets, and play...

This instructional activity asks young readers to predict what will happen to Harry Potter. While the question has been answered by the last book and film in the series, the concept and links provided by The New York Times’ Learning...

As part of their study of future tense verbs, language learners engage in activities, read fables, and sing songs. The 25-page packet includes detailed lessons, worksheets, graphic organizers, and answer keys for assessments.

Collect and graph data using Microsoft Excel with your math class. They will make predictions about the number of each colored candy in a bag of M&M's, then sort, classify, count, and record the actual data before using Excel to...