Fifth graders summarize a decade in the twentieth century and compare it to another decade. They present facts in a Hyperstudio document that includes text, photos, and audio to describe the decade.

Students explore the concept of philanthropy. In this service learning lesson, students create an action plan as pairs study a number of texts dealing with Jewish perspectives on the mastery of the earth. They then determine how these...

Over the course of the lesson, your pupils read and analyze a translated eight-line poem from the Tang Dynasty written by Du Fu, a poet caught behind enemy lines during the An Lu-Shan rebellion (755-763). Literary/historical context is...

Your class hears a Native American Indian point of view of Europeans' arrival in Louisiana. They assess how cultural perspectives (especially an insider's view) and native language can shape a story. Each pupil identifies the...

An informative physics lesson includes two teacher demonstrations, one on AC currents and the other on DC currents, allowing pupils to take notes while watching. The resource includes questions to assign as homework or...

Designed to assess your class's ability to follow directions, this reading activity has learners split into groups, read a series of instructions, read a passage, and answer two lists of questions. Can they remember to raise their hand...

By The Great Horn Spoon is a fantastic novel for introducing learners to life during the California Gold Rush. First, kids research and analyze American folk songs, then they connect to the text as they listen to symphonic pieces written...

Students use video, Internet research and discussion to consider the presidency of Richard Nixon. They obtain information from multiple perspectives and form an opinion of how Richard Nixon should be remembered.

Discuss the life of Franklin D. Roosevelt. This story, called "Franklin D. Roosevelt" by Laura Hamilton Waxman, is used to explore comprehension skills. Some of these skills include identifying prefixes and suffixes, making comparisons,...

To set the stage for reading Paradise Lost, class members compete an anticipation guide containing statements that connect to themes in Milton's epic poem.

Second graders discover that people can connect the dots of the stars to make pictures in the sky and have been doing so for thousands of years. They understand that throughout the United States people worked together to plan an escape...

The broad ideas included here provide clear ideas on how to use brain-targeted learning, what activities work best with Tuck Everlasting, how to apply the knowledge gained from their reading, and ideas for evaluation.  Not teaching...

Eighth graders identify and explain the connections between new ideas and information and their previous beliefs, values, and experiences. They understand that certain themes are relevant to their lives. They realize the harm of clicks...

Under construction, this instructional activity focuses on Canto Familia, a collection of poetry about Gary Soto's experiences growing up in California's Imperial Valley. Representative of the experiences of many Latinos, the poems also...

Learn about the events that helped shape the United States of America. Elementary schoolers explore the Civil War with six different activities. Each activity has a different focus: literature connections, primary sources, vocabulary,...

Have you used the directed reading thinking activity in your classroom? Doubling as either a prereading strategy, or a during reading strategy, it helps readers connect the historical background of the text to the text itself. As the...

Young scholars connect the symbols from the design of the United States Mint Fifty State Quarters Program to our country's history in this five-lesson unit. The culture, unique heritage, and geography of the individual states are probed.

Tenth graders explore Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. After reading specific scenes, they brainstorm and discuss free will. Students observe a clip from the Dr. Phil television show entitled, "Afraid to Age" and make connections from the...

"How are belief systems represented and reproduced through nature?" This essential question guides lesson 6 of this unit on The Odyssey (the rest of the unit is linked). Students first write about a scenario in which they are...

Poems by O. Henry, Marion Dane Bauer, Monty Roberts, and Langston Hughes provide the text for a study of symbolism, hyperbole, and imagery. Employing the “think-pair-share” strategy learners generate definitions of these terms and locate...

Use this SMART board activity with any short story in your unit plan. The SMART board file contains a step-by-step guide to plot diagrams, including an interactive practice page and an assignment. This resource is beneficial for language...

First, next, and last, the elements of chronological order. In every story or text one can find a series of events that occur one after the other. To help learners with visual impairments conceptualize chronological order, this...

Learners examine the various roles Washington Irving had in his lifetime. Examining the situation in Europe and the United States, they are encouraged to relate Irving's experiences to different events. They examine themselves in many...

Prior to reading Fever 1793, class members are introduced to vocabulary drawn from the text of Laurie Halse Anderson's novel with a bingo-style activity. The vocabulary list, a teacher copy with definitions, and the bingo template are...