Who gets to vote? Learn more about struggles for suffrage throughout United States history with a lesson based on primary source documents. Middle schoolers debate the importance of women's suffrage and African American...

Textbooks are heavier than a sheet of paper, so how can paper hold up a textbook? Young engineers create a structure out of paper that can support a textbook. To add another wrinkle, they must stay within budget and time constraints.

Telling young people to just say no can be difficult in a world that inundates them with messages to just say yes. A lesson on media messages encourages teenagers to analyze song lyrics and advertisements that mention drugs...

Many phenomena in life are periodic in nature. A task-based lesson asks scholars to explore one of these phenomena. They collect data showing the sunrise time of a specific location over the period of a year. Using the data, they create...

Learners compute the cost of electricity used to light their classroom and their school for various lengths of time. They compute the amount of coal needed to produce the electricity used for one hour of light in their classroom. An...

Fifth graders use photographs to tell the story of immigrants. They use the Internet to help them research immigration.

There are so many ways to tell a story! Develop visual storytelling skills while facilitating an understanding of Greek art and culture. Learners design Greek style images to tell a story through art. They add their designs to Styrofoam...

Inspire your class to look at their environments as if they were seeing them for the first time in order to gain a better understanding of the concept of perspective. After exploring their communities and keeping a journal of major...

Help your middle schoolers identify personal experience narratives in their own lives through telling stories themselves and from family members or other adults. They study personal experience narratives in Swapping Stories and compare...

The lesson starts out with a brain drain, which is a great way to get students to activate prior knowledge and build lasting connections. They tell everything they know about prime factorization, use their knowledge to...

Have you ever conducted a Web search and received too many hits? Teach your class about Boolean search terms and provide them time to practice conducting efficient online searches. This lesson plan contains several fun activities which...

Class pairs select a prompt from a provided list and tell (and record) their story to their partner. They then examine linguist William Labov's model for natural narratives, and apply his model to their tale. Next, class members watch...

Boris is the smartest baby around! Beginning readers can use this short story excerpt to practice reading comprehension and fiction elements. They read the story and then discuss what they think he will do next. Scholars create an...

What can we find in a dictionary? Your scholars may be surprised to hear that it's more than just definitions. They explore this resource by finding word meanings, uses, and origins in this vocabulary worksheet. Learners look up five...

What would a main idea be without important details? Readers use a graphic organizer to record key details from an informational text (a fiction text would also work). Review main idea as a concept before beginning, asking scholars...

What can maps tell us about the past? Find out with a Spanish lesson that incorporates geography. After examining maps individually, comparing two old maps of Spanish Florida and writing notes in the provided Venn diagram, pupils pair up...

Use a graph to tell a story! Given a graph, young scientists create a story to match. They must provide their own axes labels and description of the scenario. The graph has increasing, decreasing, and constant sections.

Factors, zeros, and solutions, oh my! Don't let your classes become overwhelmed with the vocabulary. An engaging lesson helps learners make a connection between factors, zeros, and solutions. Pupils explore the relationship between the...

Don't part with a resource on partitive division. Continuing along the lines of the previous lesson, pupils create stories for division problems, this time for partitive division problems. Trying out different situations and units allows...

Bella and Molly at spending time at the playground, but encounter a problem. Read about their problem and how each of them works together to solve it. Then, readers answer five questions about what they read in the passage.

Students determine the percentage increase in output of solid waste in the U.S. They determine the length of time it takes for throw away items to decompose.

Upper elementary learners identify the Aztecs as the builders of a great city and rich civilization in what is now Mexico. They locate the Aztec Empire and its capital on a map and place the Aztecs in the chronology of American history....

In this counting money activity, learners count the total amount of coins, then read word problems telling amount of purchases, cross off the coins needed to pay for the purchases, and count the remaining coins. Students solve four word...

Middle schoolers write descriptions, narratives, and dialogues based on objects of art and time periods in a museum. They base several writing assignments on art objects and paintings, including a literal description and an emotional...