Teaching With Documents Lesson Plan: "A Date Which Will Live in Infamy"

Young historians will learn not to fear primary source materials (or fear itself, for that matter) thanks to this resource that uses Franklin D. Roosevelt's March 4, 1933 Inaugural Address to model how to conduct a close reading of such...

Franklin D. Roosevelt's April 14, 1938 Fireside Chat on economic conditions provides young historians an opportunity to polish their primary source comprehension skills. A great resource to add to you curriculum library.

Immaculate, accumulation, dissipation. Vocabulary drawn from chapter 16 of James McBride's memoir, The Color of Water, can prove to be challenge for readers. To help kids understand the meaning of these words and what they add to the...

Everyone talks about dotting your i's and crossing your t's, but what about curling your apostrophes? These important punctuation marks are the focus of this presentation. Class members will learn all about contractions, plurals, and...

Thrill your class with the daily doubles and increasing points of Jeopardy! Complete with sound effects and visual cues, the game focuses on parts of speech, including nouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. Each point square links to a...

What does "freedom of speech" mean to your class, especially in the context of Internet communications? In round-table discussion format, middle and high schoolers address the issues discussed in "State Legislatures Across U.S. Plan to...

"How can a few good words save a pig's life?" Posed with this question, your ELD students explore E.B. White's Charlotte's Web in a meaningful, valuable way. By analyzing specific word choice from the book, especially the excerpts...

Study the importance of word choice in informational text. Middle and high schoolers locate unfamiliar words and phrases in newspaper articles of their choosing, and use online word sites to explore the definitions and histories of each....

Use the Visual Thesaurus to predict the subject matter of Rick Riordan's book The Lightning Thief. A pre-reading activity encourages middle schoolers to use context clues and word meaning to discover what the book is about. After...

Examine the changing nature of language in the U.S. View and discuss excerpts from a PBS documentary with your class and then conduct Internet research, and complete a team project on the evolution of teen expressions.