Learning Activities: Magic Words

Understanding a word's etymology can really help with decoding and building vocabulary skills. Readers compare and contrast words of similar origins but with different difficulty levels. They focus on prefixes, suffixes, and affixes....

A scripted lesson plan can be a big help for new teachers. This fully scripted three-day learning activity provides teachers with the means to demonstrate how to compare and contrast two topics in two texts. Learners will work as a class...

Groups use a Venn diagram to compare the theme of love and loss in Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address to Stanford University students and Christopher Paul Curtis' Bud, Not Buddy.

Read about the ways that different cultures set up homes with a set of reading activities. Learners read short paragraphs that cover one or more different ideas, and answer four questions about what they have read, including whether or...

Studying plant, animal, or insect life cycles? Pair a science unit with a reading comprehension worksheet on life cycles. The passage touches briefly on butterfly, plant, frog, and dog life cycles before prompting readers to answer six...

Students study life cycles including developing their understanding of the human life cycle. They decide where they are in the human life cycle and provide reasons for that placement. They compare the human life cycle to that of the...

Compare and contrast while challenging your class with this higher-level thinking and reading comprehension lesson. After observing the teacher model comparing and contrasting bats and birds, learners read passages about two towns. They...

Students gain an understanding of how systems and organs in the human body work. They create their own fictional account of a trip through the human body, and describe one response the body makes to stimuli.

Breathe some life into product design. Pupils learn about the stages of product creation, use, and disposal—sometimes called a cradle-to-grave assessment. They see how this cycle relates to the life cycle of organisms.

What's the best resource to use when looking up words? Use Visual Thesaurus to see a word's meaning. The class accesses the interactive website and then compares and contrasts the difference between using a traditional dictionary and the...