If your class is reading Jane Yolen's Letting Swift River Go, explore these vocabulary words in context: faint, quench, remain, and sacred. Before reading the story aloud, acquaint learners with these words briefly....

Readers are introduced to the key themes in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie by this carefully crafted anticipation guide. A great discussion starter.

Three apples—green, red, and rotten—exemplify character traits, negative and positive. Following a discussion about the classroom community, scholars complete an apple-themed worksheet that challenges them to read each trait, color it...

Here is a fabulous, five-page lesson plan on how keywords can help a reader with his/her reading comprehension. After a teacher-led discussion, pupils pair off with each other and work together to identify the main idea in a passage of...

Readers of Twelfth Night use a KWHL chart to record information about what they know about Shakespeare's play, what they want to find out, how they plan on finding this information, and what they have learned or still want to learn about...

After responding to a series of prompts on an anticipation guide, readers of Unwind craft five predictions about what will happen in Neal Shusterman's young adult science fiction novel.    

Find the main idea in an informational text with a versatile instructional activity. Three levels of differentiation help you implement the strategy in any age or class level, based on the ability and objectives of your learners.

Explore soil, genetic traits, natural resources, and pollution in a series of lessons that focus on biodiversity. Kids complete experiments to learn more about the importance of varied genes and organisms in an ecosystem.

After completing Chapter 5 of Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, readers make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections to Victor Martinez's novel by crafting journal entries addressing comments and questions to characters in...

To gain a better understanding of characters in Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, kids create a biopoem for one of her characters.

Readers use Bloom's Taxonomy to create multi-level questions about Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. 

Are executives as powerful as they sound? High schoolers find out about the US president and executive branch. A variety of activities include scaffolded reading sections, research assignments, and collaborative group work.

We should all do more exercising, but should the judicial branch as well? High schoolers develop their understanding of what powers the judicial branch carries because of the US Constitution, as well as where their limits lie in the...

When studying artifacts, especially tools, how do archaeologists determine what the devices were used for? In what ways might researchers' previous experiences influence their perception of an artifact? An article about researchers'...

Recognize risky behaviors and avoid them! That's the big idea behind two activities designed to teach middle schoolers to think critically about online safety. After reading background articles about protecting online identity,...

Begin your discussion about Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility before you even open the book. Kids fill in a worksheet that lists five statements about the literary themes of the novel, and then discuss their opinions as a...

Second graders read the story The Stolen Smell and participate in many language arts based activity connected to the story. They participate in discussions, vocabulary work, analyzing the story, public speaking, illustrating pictures,...

For the warm-up in this cool climate lesson, you will need to click on "Mapping" and then "US Mapping" once you arrive at NOAA's "US Climate at a Glance" page. Earth science explorers realize that 2012 was a warm winter for us. They read...

Chapter nine of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath provides the text for an exercise that asks readers to think deeply about the items the Joads left behind and what these items might represent.

As part of a discussion of The Last Lecture, class members engage in a gallery walk silent discussion by recording their responses to a series of questions and images posted about the classroom.

Readers of Neal Shusterman's young adult science fiction novel, Unwind, engage in a silent discussion, posting their responses to a series of statements about characters in the story.

Examine two of Sor Juana's sonnets in depth. Learners first listen to an audio recording or a reading of the sonnets and then analyze the structure and form, paying attention to elements of the Baroque and el gongorismo. Assess student...

Blundering, audacious, obscurest. Class members develop strategies for teaching each other vocabulary words drawn from The Hobbit.

To make vocabulary words drawn from So Far from the Bamboo Grove memorable, class members select a word from the provided list and incorporate this word in a joke, story, or performance.