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Food, Glorious Food?
How are the reactions between American and European consumers different when it comes to genetically modified foods? Use the New York Times article "Consumers in Europe Resist Gene-Altered Foods" to inform your middle schoolers...
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Technical Merits
What is technical knowledge? The class explores what technical knowledge might mean to an Olympic athlete. They catalog the different types of information that athletes would need to compete in various Winter Olympic sports and develop...
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An Introduction to Counting in Swahili
Create and illustrate individual books that aid young learners in learning to count 1-10 in Swahili. They discuss and appreciate a different culture, and find out about Africa through illustrating individual books.
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A Way with Words
How do facts and opinions impact the news? After reading "How to Cover a War" from the New York Times, middle schoolers evaluate the claims in the article. They also consider the media's responsibilities in reporting during wartime....
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Be That As It Maya
Creative projects are a great way to engage your class and can be a fun way to assess mastery! Learners create brochures and postcards that might have been created by and for travelers to ancient Mayan cities. They read and discuss the...
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For the Record
Students read a New York Times article in order to examine the importance of cultural artifacts. They create essays from the point of view of one cultural artifact to demonstrate the knowledge they gained by doing research.
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What Can We Learn about India from a Ten Rupee Bank Note?
The class finds and cites evidence showing India's unity in diversity and work to recognize some of the complex interactions of a civilized community. They read to understand how geography, history, politics, economics,...
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Investigating the Swissair Flight 111 Tragedy
Middle schoolers read two articles about the same event: "Plane from J.F.K Crashes off Canada" from the New York Times and "No Survivors from Crash of Swissair Jetliner Off Nova Scotia" from the Associated Press. They then compare the...
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Just the Facts, Ma'am
Elementary learners identify the main elements of story structure and form questions to summarize their reading. They listen as the teacher reads a story and then write questions to determine (1) main characters, (2) setting, (3)...
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The True Story
What's your favorite fairy tale? Seventh graders rewrite their favorite fairy tale from another character's perspective rather than the one in which it is written. This lesson helps readers become familiar with the literary term point of...
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Math: Fractions
Participate in a class lesson on ratio, rate, and unit rate. Successful usage of this lesson requires the pupils and the teacher have access to the Scott Foresman/Addison Wesley Middle School math text. However, the unit rate problems...
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Literary Analysis - Young Goodman Brown
Why is literary analysis so important? Readers explore writing a literary analysis by reviewing literary elements such as character, metaphor, plot, setting, simile, personification, and style. They read "Young Goodman Brown" by...
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Foreshadowing and Situational Irony in Kate Chopin Short Stories
This resource contains summaries of the stories featured, but limited procedural detail. Readers compare Chopin's stories' use of situational irony and foreshadowing. High interest content (questionable paternity, missing persons) for...
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Ivan the Fool
Students read a classic folk tale, Ivan the Fool, and complete shared reading activities. In this reading activities activity, students complete a shared reading of the folk tale and write a summary for the story.
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Web Designs: A Story Comes Alive
Learners work cooperatively to choose a theme, write a story, and produce a web site to display this story in this middle-level lesson on the career of a web designer. This excellent lesson ends with an organized, web site launch party.
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Research Skills: Information Retrieval and Evaluation
Focus on research skills, specifically identifying key words and concepts on a specific topic and evaluating information for relevance and authority. This is part of a multi-step instructional activity on Ancient Rome; however, it is...
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Introducing Literacy Elements in Nonfiction
Explore nonfiction writing with your class. They will identify elements in nonfiction by reviewing elements of fiction. Then they use biographies, memoirs, menus, Time for Kids, and text books to identify elements of nonfiction. They...
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Fluency is the Key!
A field trip to the library begins this lesson where children select their own books to practice fluent silent reading. They then practice their writing by creating a new ending to the story they chose before receiving a mini-lesson on...
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Hispanic and English Literature
Eleventh graders listen to a brief history activity about the 40's and 50's mid-West America and the Migrant workers that worked the fields. Next, learners will read a short story written by Tomas Rivera (both in Spanish and English)....
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Teaching Grammar in Context: Using Sentence Combining to Teach Subordination
Reinforce sentence styles with this lesson, which prompts young grammarians to build complex and compound-complex sentence structures. They respond to non-print text and identify subordinators as parts of speech procedure. They spell...
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Super Summarizer!!!
Emerging readers summarize a nonfiction text using a five step process. After a brief demonstration of the five-step method for summarizing text, they read a nonfiction article and write their own summary. A checklist of each summary is...
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An Elementary School Day in Korea
Students study the similarities and differences between their school and a school in Korea. In this culture study lesson, students discuss and list their classroom's weekly schedule. Students then read about a Korean class schedule and...
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Analyzing Literature via Literature Circles
Introduce literature circles with Roland Smith's novels. Your seventh graders will see the activity modeled as you read The Three Little Pigs together and apply the format to a Roland Smith novel of their choice. The lesson includes...
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Greek Geography
A riddle and a class lecture kick off this lesson on Greek Geography and city features. Learners use a worksheet to answer questions related to what they learned in lecture and complete a homework assignment. Note: This is a lesson...