Here is a multiple choice question that would make a good assessment question. Algebra students are to look at the structure of the formula for a given radius of a cylinder and find the resulting radius when the height of the...

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...

Look back at the third chapter of The Cay with your class. Pupils will conduct a close reading, taking a second look at a chunk of text and responding to a series of text-dependent questions. Wrap up with an analytical writing prompt...

Encourage your learners to examine the setting in Theodore Taylor's The Cay. Pupils work in small groups to put together a description of the setting before reading two more chapters of the book. They use their double-entry journals to...

Get started with The Cay. First, provide some background information and images that relate to the novel. Then pupils can create double-entry journals. Once that is complete, read the first two chapters, encouraging individuals to record...

Building on the previous activity in this series of lesson seeds, this plan focuses on the use of dialect in Theodore Taylor's novel, The Cay. Class members examine specific lines of text, use their reading journals to respond to the...

If you're looking to set your class up for writing effective arguments, try out this idea. While originally created with freedom as a guiding idea, the activity could easily be adapted for other themes. As a class, create a chart of...

Make a study of the First Amendment and its relationship to freedom. Pupils rewrite the amendment and discuss the central idea before focusing on a specific phrase. After discussing, class members write a journal entry about the included...

Use Langston Hughes's poem, "Words Like Freedom," to explore the concepts of freedom and liberty. Learners read the poem, determine the theme, and use the provided graphic organizer to examine the connotative and denotative meanings of...

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....

Focus on plot and the impact-specific events in The Cay. Class members use their double-entry journals, created in a previous lesson in this series, to record their thinking about the guiding question as they read chapters 15 through 17....

Wrap up your unit on The Cay with an engaging argumentative writing assignment. Writers must decide if they believe The Cay should be banned. The resource includes links to several articles, which have been addressed and examined in...

Prepare your class for argumentative writing with a close inspection of the controversy surrounding Theodore Taylor's novel, The Cay. All necessary articles and materials are linked at the beginning of the resource. Kids use the provided...

Building upon prior lessons in the series, this reading and writing exercise requires pupils to look back at their own writing, track character development in the novel The Cay, and analyze how Phillip has changed. The reading focus is...

Save trees! Save graphite! Save ink! Go paperless! Make a list, mindmap, sketch an idea. Import, scale, rotate, and add text to images. Save content into books and share your creations. All this and more is yours with a free visual...

Practice with unit rates, proportions, and ratios when Carlos purchases an amount of bananas. Learners must interpret a graph to decide whether points on the same line represent similar proportional relationships. Use with lesson plans...

Written to assess high schoolers' knowledge of interpreting expressions that represent a quantity in terms of its context, this machine-scored task also allows for a good discussion about units guiding the problem solving and solution.

Want a handy way to remember the difference between metaphors and similes, or allusions and alliteration? Individuals craft their own figurative language booklet, complete with definitions, examples, and illustrations, following...

How do you create a technical drawing? Cover the basics of technical sketching with a few practice sketches of simple shapes. A technical sketching lesson introduces the proper precision measurement techniques. Pupils progress...

Getting water to a tap requires an understanding the fundamentals of fluid flow. Groups design, build, and test a piping system to get water from the source — a five gallon bucket — to a tippy tap. The objective is to be able to...

Design and build a rover ... then eat it? This activity has groups of two design and build Mars rovers. The teams determine what instruments they want to include with their rover and plan a budget. They calculate the cost of the body of...

What constitutes a good soap bubble? In the second installment of a nine-part series, scholars apply their understanding of surface tension to soap bubbles. They experiment to determine the best solutions to use for the...

Young entomologists construct three types of insect traps—pitfall, pollinator, and panel—before setting their traps out and observing what they caught. They then observe what types of insects the different traps attract.

Discover how innovations can help your school and community. In the three-part STEM lesson, scholars learn the meaning of innovation and brainstorm innovations in their schools. They identify issues in their communities and think of...