National Park Service
Reduce Our Carbon Footprint, Let’s Compost!
Roll up your sleeves and get a little dirty with this elementary and middle school compost lesson. All you need is a large plastic container, a couple old newspapers, some organic waste, and a few hundred worms and you're ready to start...
National Park Service
Glaciers and Water
Explore the amazing power of glaciers with a hands-on earth science experiment! After first learning basic background information, learners go on to create their very own chunks of frozen water and gravel in order to observe first-hand...
National Park Service
What Can We Do?
Motivate young conservationists to stand up and make a change. After learning about the efforts in Cascade Nation Park to reduce carbon emissions in order to preserve the wilderness, students work in groups creating action plans for...
Oxford University Press
Vocabulary Unit 5.3: People and Skills, Adjectives
Find out who works in various careers with a vocabulary activity, which features matching activities and a crossword puzzle. Learners use word banks to figure out which skills belong to which career, and then fill in the blanks with...
Torrey Maldonado
Anti-Bullying & Conflict-Resolution Lesson
Invite your class to consider how to respond to a conflict. Designed to be used alongside Secret Saturdays by Torrey Maldonado, a lesson plan focuses on a set of terms: conflict, escalate, deescalate, conflict resolution, denial, and...
Curated OER
The Outsiders Vocabulary
Looking for a vocabulary list and exercise to use with a study of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton? Try out this resource, which provides both the list and the exercise. Each of 19 words is paired with a part of speech and definition or...
Curated OER
Edgar Allan Poe Short Story WebQuest
Introduce your class to Edgar Allan Poe with a series of mostly self-guided tasks and assignments. Class members follow the list of tasks, starting by watching a video with background information and ending with a compare-and-contrast...
Massasoit Community College
Vocabulary: Getting Meaning From Context
Introduce your class to four different types of context clues: definition, example, comparison or contrast, and inference. Each type has its own description, example, and practice set. After pupils have mastered the four types, put it...
Google
Beginner 3: Narrowing a Search to Get the Best Results
Uncover new or more relevant information with the filtering tools in the top navigation bar. First, show your class the tools and demonstrate how to use a few. Next, give class members some time to apply what they have learned. They can...
Google
Intermediate 3: Narrowing a Search to Get the Best Results
Examine advanced filters and operators in depth. Class members try out even more filtering tools than they did in the beginning lesson and practice with operators, special symbols or words that affect search results, recognized by...
Curated OER
Vocabulary and Concept Development
Considering a lesson on Greek and Latin roots and affixes? The Latin roots bas and pos, and the Greek root bas are the focus on a colorful, animated presentation that will engage your learners and provide guided and independent practice...
Curated OER
Hoot: Vocabulary: Magic Squares
Define words with numbers in a fun vocabulary activity. Using words from Hoot by Carl Hiaasen, learners use a grid to match words and their definitions, and to find the magic number that is the same when the numbers are added from all...
Curated OER
Monster Vocabulary
Challenge language arts learners with a crossword puzzle that focuses on vocabulary words from Walter Dean Myers' Monster. After kids read the clues at the bottom of the page, they complete the puzzle with their newly defined words.
Pennington Publishing
Vocabulary Worksheet #1 & #2
These two worksheets cover several grammatical topics. Pupils work on words with multiple meanings, Greek and Latin word parts, word connotations, academic language, and more. The result is seven quick exercises that could be used...
TV411
Remembering New Words
Four strategies learners can use to remember new words are detailed on a one-page worksheet. They are shown how to find synonyms, make a personal connection, think of antonyms, and how to make up a sentence that puts the words together....
TV411
Understanding Hard Words
Two strategies for decoding unfamiliar words are featured on a worksheet that illustrates how to use the parts of words (prefix, root, and suffix) and context to determine meaning. Examples are included as is a guided practice exercise.
TV411
How Many Languages Do You Speak When You Speak English?
What do the words pizza, broccoli, and ciao have in common? Why they are all English words that originally came from Italian. Ask your middle schoolers to guess the origins of a list of words by matching the word with the language from...
Polk Bros Foundation
I Can Infer the Meaning of a Word in Context
Work on developing strategies for determining the meaning of unknown words and phrases with a quick context clues exercise. Class members choose two words from their reading and write down what they think they mean and why. See the...
Curated OER
What Does PAN Mean?
Do your middle school scholars need practice decoding words while reading or for spelling? The root word pan is the focus of a nine-step lesson that asks learners to discover ways to figure out the meaning of words built on a root that...
Curated OER
Symbiosis: Help, Hinder or Destroy
Use background information and vocabulary to familiarize your students with the concept of symbiosis and the role agriculture plays in the shared relationship. They then write the vocabulary in their lab books or journals, and read the...
Curated OER
Fruit or Vegetable?
Watermelon is a vegetable? A tomato is a fruit? Believe it or not, this debate is decades old. Groups examine rulings by the US Supreme Court, the USDA, and state statutes before developing their own criteria to use when labeling the...
Curated OER
A Tough Nut to Crack
Children, based on a set of criteria, evaluate the quality of pecans. They research recorded history of pecan trees as well as how their seeds moved across western Missouri into southeastern Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Mexico. In...
Curated OER
DNA Blueprint for Life
Did you know that meat tenderizers contain DNA cutting enzimes? Did you know that you can isolate your own DNA? Or the DNA of fruit? Explore with your learners the DNA world with a series of experiments using readily available materials...
Curated OER
Circles in the Landscape: Irrigating Oklahoma Crops
How do you grow crops in a area with insufficient rainfall? Why you irrigate, of course. Class members investigate irrigation systems by designing a system of their own. After examining irrigation related concepts, vocabulary terms, and...