How should America respond to acts of domestic terrorism? What motivates or prompts a terrorist attack? After reading an opinion piece on the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, your learners will critically analyze factors that could have...

Follow the format of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles with a journal-writing activity. Readers choose a character and examine the character's life and circumstances through brainstorming, research, and discussion before...

A lesson challenges scholars to create a cinquain poem. Writers begin by choosing a topic and brainstorm details, then compose their original poem making sure to count syllables. 

Who keeps animals safe? Who keeps us safe? Discover the helpers that make learning and growing possible through a medley of activities that focus on habitats—ours and those in the rainforest. Scholars are asked to identify one...

A creative way bring autobiographical writing to your poetry unit or back-to-school curriculum, this lesson plan guides you through a bio poem activity. Kids use the graphic organizer to describe themselves using adjectives, things...

Poetry Soup, a reading and writing unit constructed by the Petrified Forest National Park, will have scholars hungry to learn about nature. The cross-content unit contains topics related to history, science, and language arts. Content...

Here's a project that gives academics the chance to share their opinions on social justice with storytelling, creative writing, or art. Scholars choose what they want to create and are assigned buddies to support their efforts. To...

Close your eyes and picture a time where you decided to tell the truth to someone. What were you wearing? How did you feel? Such prompts begin a guided imagery activity for Zach's Lie. Directions for creating an environment conducive to...

Combine math, creative writing, and leprechauns in a fun St. Patrick's Day activity! Using a bag of gold coins and marshmallows, kids write a math story about a leprechaun that includes a multi-step equation to solve.

Get your young writers outside of the traditional essay writing mode with Free Write Friday. Free Write Friday encourages your class to use personal experiences or knowledge to write more creative pieces. Young writers could experiment...

Finish a unit on Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea with a narrative essay. Based on Santiago's harrowing adventures, the essay prompts readers to think about a time when they were faced with a challenge, overcame a...

Scholars learn about the Hero's Journey as they read Ray Bradbury's "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh." They analyze the story's structure and narrative techniques. Finally, they write summaries of the text's central idea and use their...

Leonardo da Vinci is the focus of a hands-on activity that encourages scholars to become inventors. Pupils brainstorm and sketch their idea, compose a detailed depiction using a mirror writing technique, and antique the paper for a...

Is there a way to connect creative thinking, logical reasoning, mathematical understanding, and humor? You bet there is! Kids begin by creating creative math quizzes, which require creative thinking to solve. For example, 1+1=24, one...

The opening chapters of Mark Twain's masterpiece, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, can be daunting for some readers. A reader's theater assignment divides the second chapter of the novel into a seven-role script, allowing...

Writing teaches us so much. One can identify the many characteristics of a newspaper, use the Internet to gather information, and communicate with others. Primary students create a class newspaper for publishing and dispersal.

Your students already know when they like a story and when they don't, but they may not know that the plots of these stories are shaping that opinion. Like all resources in this series, the two activities and quizzes provided here deal...

Class members conclude their reading of The House on Mango Street with an assignment that asks them to compose letters to characters using their own voices or that of another character in Cisneros' story.

If you're reading the story "Merry Christmas, Geraldine" by Holly Keller, this is a fantastic cross-curricular resource to use. Complete with activities for language arts, science, social studies, art, and math, you'll get the most out...

A fiction and nonfiction text, The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest by Lynne Cherry and I See a Kookaburra! Discovering Animal Habitats Around the World by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page begins a learning experience in...

From play pumps that provide clean water to shoes made from trash, innovators change the world one invention at a time. After researching various inventions, young entrepreneurs develop their own. Extension opportunities include prompts...

For each week of Lent, focus on a specific gospel passage, theme, and guiding question with your class members. Your pupils will engage in a variety of hands-on activities, discussion points, and worksheets following Jesus'...

How can we create a more fair world? Chances are, class members have some ideas! After reading a text about fairness, individuals create skits around the ideas of fairness. Extend the learning and make their presentations a...

Delve into Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis before opening the book with a lesson on literary themes. High schoolers engage in a word association activity before reading a list of statements based on the book's...