Amelia Earhart's accomplishments and strength of character extend beyond her status as one of the first female aviators in America. Elementary and middle schoolers learn about Earhart's early life and the historical context surrounding...

Explore ways to make research and writing more interesting. The first in a series of three challenge activities designed to accompany Theme 2: Give It All You've Got involve creating sports cards, designing cereal boxes, and using other...

Readers apply Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious mind and the psychological approach to literary criticism to analyze and evaluate the relationship between two characters in A Separate Peace.

Students improve their reading comprehension through predicting, connecting with text and summarizing. Students should have already read the book Seedfolks and made predictions based upon what they had seen from the cover and pictures...

Tenth graders use the novel To Kill a Mockingbird to analyze relationships in society. For this literature analysis lesson, 10th graders participate in a shoe activity where they bring in one shoe belonging to someone they know and a...

Students practice writing with sentence fluency in order to make the story more enjoyable for the reader. In this sentence fluency lesson plan, students focus on rhythm and flow.

Students increase their reading fluency through the use of various strategies. After reviewing decoding, and rereading, students complete an initial read of a novel text. Working with a partner, they read complete a timed assessment of...

Students discover shapes on a playground. In this guided reading instructional activity, students discover new vocabulary words related to shapes as they read Shapes Where We Play. In small groups, students use picture clues and one to...

Students use maps to locate the countries of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. In groups, they compare and contrast the three countries in regard to their culture, morals and values. They read various examples of folktales and write their...

Fifth graders examine how to respond to literature. In this literature response lesson, 5th graders discuss how to respond to literature. They write a response in a literature log each night based on their reading and the connections...

Practice is a great way to build skills in reading with fluency and intonation. In leveled pairs, learners read a simple passage pausing as indicated by the marks on the page. They take turns reading the passage until they are both...

Use this lesson to study similes and metaphors and the inferred meaning. In this language arts lesson, 5th graders write their own similes and metaphors. A worksheet is provided for extension work or to check understanding as homework.

Determining the meaning of a word based on context clues or marking how the meaning of a term evolves in the course of a document can be a challenge in more complex text. Give your pupils an opportunity to practice this skill with a...

It is no easy feat to wade through legal and political documents. And incorporating this type of informational text into a literature class can also be a challenge. Here’s a resource that includes suggestions for how to address this...

Read this paragraph out loud to your class to demonstrate pronunciation of and introduce context for the given vocabulary words. You might also use this as a cloze activity and have class members read each vocabulary word or repeat each...

Readers select a character from Call of the Wild, record their responses to a series of prompts in a spiral notebook, and use details from the novel to support their thinking. The spirals are then used as source material to support...

Collaborate with another class (or school) and have your learners share ideas about their reading through the use of email. Perhaps you'll create a specific question or a few questions for writers to choose from. Not only will they...

Kindergarteners and first graders discover the /u/ sound! After practicing making the sound with the funny tongue twister, youngsters use their Elkonin letterboxes to divide a set of words into their phonemes. Then pairs read Bud...

Clarify, connect, evaluate, predict, question. Laminate and display these colorful posers about the classroom to remind readers of the five basic strategies for comprehending all sorts of text. 

Get your class up and moving as they explore how to express movement and dance through words. Designed around two poems by Lillian Morrison about break dancing, the activity truly captures the creative and multi-sensory aspects of...

Young scholars complete research to enhance their reading of "The Grapes of Wrath". Using the text, they identify and locate cultural artifacts and discuss their symbolic connotations. As a class, they create a museum exhibit of the...

Students investigate how to draw topographic contours and read topographic maps.They examine the topography of San Francisco and contrast the elevation of different points within San Francisco.

Are you teaching Modernism to your class? Connect different areas of artistic expression in the Modernist Era. Learners read T.S. Eliot, view art by Pablo Picasso, and listen to a Modernist musical composition. This final assignment is...

You've found the first grade Common Core jackpot! English Language Arts and Math Common Core standards are addressed in a 74-page packet complete with standard text printables, activities, cut-outs for the classroom, and worksheets.