Exploring Language: Definitions Activity

How can learners evaluate research sources for authority, accuracy, and credibility? By completing readings, discussions, and graphic organizers, scholars learn how to properly evaluate sources to find credible information. Additionally,...

Wait, you mean researchers don't all use Wikipedia? Teach your class about intelligent research with a lesson about evaluating digital sources. The lesson starts with a quickwrite and includes vocabulary exercises and several...

How do you decide what sources are credible when researching online? Evaluate sources with a focus on researching health issues. After brainstorming common health concerns and how they would try to diagnose these problems, class members...

For a class learning about Chinese and Irish immigration in America, here's a great starting lesson plan. It has your critical thinkers examining song lyrics, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and a political cartoon, and finally...

A great idea for showing language arts pupils the universality of themes, even in the real world! Have class members choose an idea-noun (peace, justice, war, love, etc.) at the beginning of the year or semester. They complete weekly...

A two-part lesson focuses on the sensitive issues of homophobia, discrimination, sexuality, and gender. Middle schoolers discuss individual and institutional discrimination, personal rights, homosexuality, and bullying.

Connect historical text to primary sources. Researchers observe and discuss primary sources. Then, historians bring in their own personal artifacts and connect them back to their history.

Distinguish between primary and secondary source documents using the theme of philanthropy. Middle schoolers discuss Anne Frank: The Diary of Young Girl as a way to study the past using a primary source. Then they investigate how to...

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...

Trailblazers forge the path into uncharted territory, they establish a precedent for others to follow. Young historians research trailblazers in Congress using primary and secondary sources to profile outliers that changed the face of...