Curated OER
Comic Life With Kenzuke's Kingdom
Kenzuke's Kingdom is a wonderful adventure about a boy sailing around the world, it's also the focus of this lesson. Students read the novel as a class then use the Comic Life website to create a two-page comic based on the story. This...
Blake Education
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
The motto for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry warns that one should never tickle a sleeping dragon, but learners will definitely be tickled by the activities in a packet of materials designed to accompany a reading of the...
American Immigration Law Foundation
An Immigrant’s Experience
After interviewing an immigrant about their voyage to the United States and first impressions of the country, young learners create a fictional series of journal entries and design an iMovie depicting their interviewee's story.
Curated OER
"The Westing Game" Activities and Lesson Plans
You can use a novel, such as "The Westing Game", to teach reading concepts and skills in a way that keeps students interested.
Curated OER
Searching for Cinderella
Students take a closer look at Cinderella stories. In this literature lesson, students discuss the attributes of Cinderella stories from around the world and conduct research to find where the "Aschenputtel" story originated. Students...
Curated OER
Community Helpers
The book, Doctor Ted is used to kick off this instructional activity on Community Helpers. Young learners make connections to their own life by dictating a story of their own, and inventing other jobs that Ted can do.
Curated OER
The Probabilities of Problems: A Look at Genetic Inheritance
Discuss an article about families affected by genetic disorders and their decisions about whether or not to evaluate their own genetic information. Investigate four different inherited disorders. Participate in a probability exercise....
Curated OER
Snowflake Bentley
Students explore crystals through the story Snowflake Bentley and then create crystal pictures of their own. For this interdisciplinary lesson, they create a crystal web chart on chart paper, design artificial snowflakes, and write poems...
Curated OER
Narrative Writing
Binoculars are used as a metaphor for good descriptive writing. Class members first view a small picture and then an enlarged view of the same image in which the details come into focus. Next, learners examine a paragraph lacking sensory...
Curated OER
Teaching Summarization
Learning to differentiate major and minor textual events can help students learn how to summarize.
Curated OER
Convince that Jury (Inspired by Roald Dahl's
What happened to a murder case when the police eat the murder weapon? After reading Roald Dahl's dark and ironic short story "Lamb to the Slaughter," students write a persuasive essay to convince a jury that the wife who killed her...
Curated OER
Using R&R to Teach Mathematics
Second graders create a shape garden. In this polygons lesson, 2nd graders practice making shapes using a geoboard and read the book The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns. Students also design a shape garden using construction paper.
Curated OER
From America, With Love
Students research the experiences of specific immigrant groups in the United States. Letters are written from imaginary immigrants to relatives in their countries of origin, including historically accurate details.
Oxford University Press
The Jungle Book
Most every teacher dreams of a ready-to-teach and print book study. Well, here it is! The Jungle Book novel resource includes 12 complete lessons studying poetry, author's craft, themes, characters, and more. Scholars role play, research...
Curated OER
Map It Out
Explore how illustrations add to a story. Young learners will look at picture books to see how the pictures tell the story. They create illustrations to go with a chosen story, and then flip the activity so they have to write a story to...
Curated OER
A Listening Doll: Create Traditional Native American Storyteller Dolls
For this wonderful cross-curricular lesson, your youngsters will learn about Pueblo Indian storyteller dolls by creating their own! They discuss the tradition of story telling, especially in reference to Native Americans. Consider ending...
Curated OER
Homer's The Odyssey
Whether or not you are new to using The Odyssey with your classes, this publisher-produced teaching guide deserves a place in your curriculum library. The packet includes background information, chapter by-chapter summaries, study...
Curated OER
Reliving History through Slave Narratives
Helpful for an American literature or history unit, this lesson prompts middle schoolers to examine slavery in the United States. They read slave narratives that were part of the Federal Writers' Project and then conduct their own...
Shmoop
ELA.CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.2
Identifying the theme or central idea of a text is a skill many young readers struggle with. It is also the second standard for reading literature in the Common Core. This resource, one from a series of Common Core lessons, can provide...
Curated OER
Let's Get it Together! Reading to Learn
Let’s learn about frogs! Young readers are led through “Freaky Frogs,” a non-fiction article. Teach learners how to edit an article so there are fewer details to sift through. After talking through the article, they learn the six steps...
Curated OER
Transition Words in Writing
Transition words in writing are the focus of the language arts lesson presented here. In it, learners cut out the word-sort cards (embedded in the plan), and put them into four categories: time, examples, space, and summary. They find a...
Curated OER
Literature Study Guide: To Kill a Mockingbird
Teaching tools designed to support student-centered literature study. Geared toward homeschoolers reading Harper Lee's book To Kill a Mockingbird, I would use these in my classroom. The materials are applicable to any text: graphic...
Curriculum Corner
7th Grade ELA Common Core Checklists
Track your class's progress on all of the ELA Common Core standards with these handy charts. Along the left side, each seventh grade identifier is listed along with the full text of the standard. As you teach, reteach, assess, and...
Museum of Disability
Taking Down Syndrome to School
Teach your class about the ways they can befriend and understand people who are different from them with a reading comprehension instructional activity. As youngsters read Taking Down Syndrome to School by Jenna Glatzer, they answer a...