It's a snow day, and two brothers attending schools with different schedules each got a late start to the day. But who had the shorter school day? That's what your class will find out as they apply their knowledge of fractions to this...

As the great and hilarious Tim Minchin once said, "Science is simply the word we use to describe a method of organizing our curiosity." Science is more than just a guess; it is based on questions, observations, and evidence. High...

Students define the steps of the formal writing process, consider the value and quality of the work done by Anne Frank in her personal diary, and create their own diary entries using the writing process outlined in class.

Students analyze the use of propaganda in the war against terrorism, focusing specifically on the attacks in Afghanistan, exploring the distinction between ideas spread to benefit a cause and those spread to damage an opposing cause.

Students, after reading the book, "Esperanza Rising," create a virtual display by combining different story elements into a visual representation. They choose the setting and characters of a scene that will act as a springboard of ideas...

Students examine how an exhibition of an author's writings can become a portrait or biography of that author . They work in small groups, analyzing various poems by Yeats.

Students read and discuss "Enigmatic Portraits of Teen-Agers Free of All Context," then choose a photograph and write a first-person narrative from the perspective of the subject.

Students explore the notion of culture and the influence of Latino culture on the U.S. They work in small groups to identify ways that Latino and non-Latino U.S. cultures have engaged in cultural 'cross-fertilization.'

Students act as groups of event planners to invent large entertainment events, determine appropriate sponsorship categories for them, identify potential sponsors within those categories, and pitch their ideas to those companies.

Students respond, in writing and in discussions, to statements of various world leaders about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. They keep quotation scrapbooks, responding to various quotations about the...

Students create their own poems to express a deep feeling or transformative experience, then write imaginary letters to people in the article, responding to their poetry and sharing their own creative process.

Learners explore the value of personal written communication as compared to the use of e-mail or text messaging.

Students share observations on the nuances of meaning in face to face and online interactions with others. After reading an article, they identify the causes and effects of internet flaming. They create their own comic strips...

Discover the Virtual Thesaurus with your class. They use the Virtual Thesaurus to assist them in an inquiry-based approach to discovering the meanings of some common Latin and Greek roots. Each child then teaches a particular root and...

Studentsl expand vocabulary through word study, literature and class discussion (e.g. word origins, roots and affixes, meaning in context, levels of usage, etc.). They recognize food-related words that have entered the English language...

Students, assessing a variety of formatting tools with Microsoft Word, utilize a bank of vocabulary words to make a personal dictionary of nouns. They classify nouns for people, places, things and ideas and separate them into common and...

First graders are exposed to addition of three whole numbers in a math activity centered around Eric Carle's, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. As the teacher reads, young mathematicians use counters and ten-frames to symbolize the number of...

Have a fun time teaching children to read analog clocks with this whole-group math activity. Using large sets of the numerals 1-12 and 0, 5, 10...55, the teacher creates a large clock on either the carpet or the white board, explaining...

Bringing together the young artists and the young organizers in your class, this lesson takes that popular topic of tessellations and gives it algebraic roots. After covering a few basic properties and definitions, learners attack the...

Is man's character his fate? Can actions change character? To track the development of the central ideas in Ethan Canin’s short story “The Palace Thief,” groups compare Hundert's actions in the original "Mr. Julius Caesar" competition...

Whether the planks hide the beating of a hideous heart or they break away to the madness beneath, their presence makes itself known in the final instructional activity of a literary analysis unit. Having gathered textual evidence from...

The terrible truth begins in a instructional activity that focuses on the final act of Sophocles' Oedipus the King. As ninth graders collect evidence that details the origin of Oedipus and how his birth relates to the prophecy everyone...

How does the theme of gender inequality develop in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Shakespeare's Hamlet? Pupils craft a multi-paragraph response to analyze the relationship between the texts. They use evidence from both works to...

In a six-problem learning activity, children are guided to solve word problems that involve rounding to the nearest ten and nearest hundred. A commentary and answer key provide different approaches that learners may take in solving the...