Curated OER
The Outsiders
Are you working on an Outsiders unit? Use this list of activities to deepen your middle schoolers' understanding of the novel. After reading S.E. Hinton's novel, young readers work on three required activities, including participating in...
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Christmas Candy
Here is a tasty topic for a lesson: Christmas candy! Third and fourth graders research classic Christmas candies, then create their very own! They write a descriptive paragraph about their candy, then use KidPix to create an illustration...
New Jersey Historical Commission and New Jersey Council for the Humanities
Thomas Edison: The Wizard of Menlo Park
What would change in your daily life due to a power outage? Here, learners explore the inventions brought to us by the one and only, Thomas Edison, and imagine a day without them. Scholars take part in a grand conversation and write a...
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Paraphrasing and Summarizing
Read an article about the migration of our ancestors and write a paragraph. Pupils paraphrase and summarize to restate the information found in a nonfiction text. They write a shortened version of the reading to demonstrate the...
American Museum of Natural History
Journey to the Bottom of the Sea
Follow the path to the sea floor. Pupils play an online interactive board game to reach the bottom of the sea. Participants must match descriptions of creatures to a property of water dealing with oxygen, food, light, or density to move...
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Picture This
Learners create a descriptive paragraph conveying ideas utilizing a personal photograph as a prompt for their writing. This concept includes the writers emotions, personal issues, education, art and photography. They share insights to...
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What's the Big Idea?
Young scholars choose a paragraph from a book of their choice, identify the main idea, and draw an illustration of the main idea. They write original paragraphs, illustrate them, and trade with a partner, identifying the main idea of the...
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PICTURE READING - PARAGRAPH WRITING
Students investigate the elements found in a media image. The image is used to compose a descriptive paragraph. They exchange papers to discuss the writing and make changes using constructive criticism. Students also make connections...
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Describe a Person
In this descriptive paragraph instructional activity, students choose one friend or family member and brainstorm information that describes them in detail. Students then write their brainstorm information into complete sentences....
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Magical Creatures
Students investigate entertaining characters within stories. In this writing lesson plan, students review nouns and adjectives and discuss magical characters. Students ask themselves questions about their selected characters and...
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Writing to See
Students write descriptively and creatively after looking carefully at a work of art.
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Picture It-Robot Writing!
Fifth graders use their listening skills to sketch draft pictures of robots described in paragraphs read by their teacher. They transfer their robot sketches to word processing documents using software drawing tools.
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Texas in the Mirror
Middle schoolers research their own and others' perceptions about Texas and become familiar with various symbols from other cultures. In this Texas in the Mirror lesson plan, students write a web page with a picture of a Texan symbol....
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Guess the Author- Using Pseudonyms
Middle schoolers write a descriptive paragraph about themselves. In this identification and pseudonyms lesson, students discuss why some authors use pseudonyms. Middle schoolers write a description of their personality, activities and...
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The Story of an Old Piano
Students read excerpts from The Story of an Old Piano. They choose a personal object and write paragraphs from the object's point of view. Their stories can be bound for the class library.
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Kandinsky on Computers
Students investigate expressionist art by researching Wassily Kandinsky. In this abstract art lesson, students utilize the Internet to visit a web museum which showcases Kandinsky's compositions. Students analyze the artistic lines and...
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It's Your Birthday! Expository Writing Unit 2
Students create an expository essay. In this writing lesson Students are assigned a country and must conduct research surrounding a historic event that occurred in that country at the time of their birth.
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Poetry as a Fine Art
Sixth graders use a visit to the National Gallery of Art to inspire descriptive writing. They choose works of art and write descriptive word lists, paragraphs and Haiku.
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Living The Life of a Scribe
Students write a descriptive letter about life in ancient Mesopotamia. Through video streaming, students discover the history of Mesopotamia. They assume the role of a scribe and compose a three paragraph essay using main ideas and...
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Why Transition?
Help your class transition into better writers with this lesson, which guides them through the process of adding transitions to increase sentence fluency and organization. The activity is designed for a classroom with a SMART board, but...
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Pizza Biography
A biography writing lesson plan with a tasty twist! Kids create a "visual biography" in which each pizza slice represents a paragraph, and toppings represent supporting details. They learn research techniques, note-taking skills, and how...
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Metaphors
Metaphors open doors to descriptive language for your poets. They read the poem "What is the Sun" and record all the metaphors they find. Then, scholars change one of them to a simile. After answering two more comprehension...
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Blogging To Create A Community of Writers # 5 of 7
Here is lesson 5 from a 7 lesson unit on using blogging to create a community of writers. The aim of this lesson is to get students writing about what Archaeologists do and how they use material data to study the past. They compose a...
Curated OER
Grade A: The Market for a Yale Woman's Eggs by Jessica Cohen
What would it be like to sell your eggs to a couple who can't have children on their own? Could you even imagine it? As most of us have never been in this position, this descriptive essay is really quite interesting. The reading itself...