After watching the documentary Dark Water about a traditional Chumash ceremony and reading a Chumash origin story, viewers are asked to create a coat of arms and to craft an essay that details a family tradition or their own origin story.

Middle schoolers complete a writing assessment task to demonstrate their ability to craft a narrative based on a variety of informational texts. They view West of the West's documentary Magic Isle, read three print resources about...

Before cell phones, tablets, and computers with access to YouTube, before gleaming multiplexes and even before television, there were small theaters with Saturday night black and white movies. Alberto Ríos's poem "When There Were Ghosts"...

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is, among other things, the study of a ruler's ambitions. Young scholars watch videos, read articles, and keep a Commonplace Book while studying the play. At the end of Act III, pupils stage the play that...

Foreshadowing, flashbacks, and imaginary places are the three topics of focus in this two-instructional activity packet written especially for the book, Bridge to Terabithia. Each instructional activity also comes with worksheets and...

What's the least number of colors needed to color a U.S. map? The activity begins by having pupils view a video clip on continuous and discrete phenomenon, then launches into an activity reminiscent of Zeno's paradox. A separate...

The man who invented the earliest examples of chemical engineering was an American-born, French-educated, free man of color before the Civil War, and went on to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. There is something of...

One of the best parts about teaching the littlest learners is that you can create thematic lessons that use one topic to address every subject. Here is a nice set of thematic teaching ideas that uses turtles and tortoises to teach...

How did the environment and natural resources found on the Channel islands influence the culture of the Chumash? Archaeology meets technology in an activity designed for middle schoolers. After viewing West of The West's documentary Once...

"First Appearance," Mark Twain's tale about overcoming stage fright, serves as a model of a personal narrative and gets young writers thinking about milestones in their own lives. After examining student models and considering the...

Here's a wonderful way to learn English grammar. Class members examine the plural count nouns in Thiele and Weiss's "What a Wonderful World," reading the lyrics as they listen to Louis Armstrong's version of this classic song.

Fun St. Patrick's Day facts abound. The lesson plan tells the story of the most famous icons associated with the holiday: the shamrock, snakes, Celtic religion, Irish history, and St. Patrick himself. 

This packet, the third in the series of support materials for the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt thematic units on voyagers, contains activities for learners who may struggle with the basic concepts of the lessons. Included are...

Here's a guide designed to build safe, respectful learning environments, and to build understanding of the value of diversity through lessons packed with activities for specific grade levels.

A free write, an image of magnolia leaves, and the Ed Roberson's poem "Once the Magnolia has Blossomed" ask scholars to use their noticing skills to reflect on the lesson beauty teaches about loss and grief.

Enhance language proficiency with a Special Friends themed English language development unit. Each lesson follows a listen, speak, move, and/or look routine that is guaranteed to get your scholars discussing topics such as animal...

Connect with the text using helpful annotation strategies. As your class reads the first section of Karen Russell's short story, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," they note important passages that establish character...

Prepare for a mid-unit assessment based on Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club with a brainstorming and discussion lesson plan. Focused on two chapters from the novel ("Rules of the Game" and "Two Kinds"), the lesson plan guides tenth graders...

Football fans and ready readers will enjoy a lesson based on H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights. Focusing on chapter 4, the lesson encourages tenth graders to examine Mike's character development as it relates to the season opener and...

Class members begin their study of Romeo and Juliet by examining the words Shakespeare chooses in the Prologue to Act I to create the tragic tone of his famous play about star-crossed lovers.

In a close reading of "The Overseer" chapter from Sugar Changed the World, groups focus on the words Aronson and Budhos use to contrast the lifestyles of enslaved people and their enslavers. The whole class then engages in an...

How do learners use textual evidence from a close reading to write a well-developed essay? Scholars try it by completing a mid-unit assessment based on their analysis of the first 15 paragraphs from "A Genetics of Justice" by Julia...

Is it better to be loved or feared? Using the resource, scholars explore Machiavelli's nonfiction text, The Prince, and examine the author's ideas about the role of leadership. Pupils also complete a Quick Write to analyze a central idea...

Become fluent in the language of mathematics. Scholars learn to divide multi-digit whole numbers and determine the most significant common factor and the least common multiple. They also investigate how to apply the distributive property...