A Visit to Aunt Louisa's

Fourth graders view examples of help-wanted ads as they plan and create their own writing in the fourteenth instructional activity of this unit on colonial trade. The engagement of the class is captured when the teacher shares an actual...

Never again will you need to worry about coming up with a writing prompt! This packet contains, as it says, 501 prompts that are suitable for fourth graders on up. The prompts are paired into four categories (persuasive, expository,...

Twenty slides make up a set of festive, May-themed writing prompts designed to grab scholars' attention and warm-up their writing skills. Prompts include story starters, holidays, research questions, the five senses, and more! 

Young historians use the SOAPS (Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject) method of questioning to determine the historical value of primary source documents. The third in a series of five lessons that model for learners how...

How reliable is a painting of the first Thanksgiving if it was created 300 years after the fact? Learners assess the validity of a primary source image to determine what it can actually reveal about this event. 

Teach the class about the predecessor to Declaration of Independence—the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Using the foundational documents, scholars examine the two writings to consider how they are similar and how they are different. A...

Why do we read primary source documents? What can they give us that other writings cannot? Provide your learners with any of the primary sources attached here (there are seven), and have them complete the graphic organizer (which opens...

Travel through Europe with ten-year-old Teddy Roosevelt in this writing activity, which uses the picture book My Tour of Europe: by Teddy Roosevelt, by Ellen Jackson. After reading the book, readers compare it to passages from The...

After reading "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," scholars discuss the emotions the events provoked in its characters. In pairs, writers compose a letter depending on the topic and style of their choice then reply to their own or a peer's...

Learners will explore the value of personal stories and first-hand accounts when exploring history, in this case, the events of the early twentieth century, which included World War I and the Great Depression. Through this five-unit...