National Center for Families Learning
The Summer Fun Summer Learning Dance Unit
Summer slide. Alas, not a term synonymous with a type of sliding board, summer slide refers to the fact that learning slips during summer break, especially in the areas of spelling and math facts. Enrich summer break with a...
Baylor College
They're Everywhere: Bacteria
Totally gross out your class with the eighth lesson in this series on food science. Explore the microscopic world of bacteria by taking swabs of different classroom objects and growing colonies in petri dishes. An engaging activity that...
Baylor College
Needs of Plants
What better way to learn about plant life than by creating a class garden? Young botanists start with a brief discussion about radishes before planting seeds and watching them grow. To determine the importance of water,...
Baylor College
Needs of Living Things: Post-Assessment
Assess your class's knowledge of the needs of living things with the final instructional activity in a series. Given a large piece of paper and coloring utensils, young scientists draw a picture of themselves and a plant or animal of...
Curated OER
Compare and Contrast Two Settings in One Text
Look for the signal words! Scholars get both instruction and practice comparing and contrasting. Although it is completely scripted, it can also serve as a detailed outline. Demonstrate this as you read a passage (included) and search...
Curriculum Corner
Book Study: The Mitten
Looking for a set of resources to compliment a reading of The Mitten by Jan Brett? A fun winter resource has everything from story sequencing and writing prompts to a parts of speech sort and a mitten flap book. The activities are great...
August House
The Contest Between the Sun and the Wind
Learn the moral of the story with a series of activities about Aesop's fables. Focusing on The Contest Between the Sun and the Wind, learners complete a graphic organizer to discuss who, what, how, and why the events occur. Additionally,...
Curated OER
Map It Out
Explore how illustrations add to a story. Young learners will look at picture books to see how the pictures tell the story. They create illustrations to go with a chosen story, and then flip the activity so they have to write a story to...
Desert Discoveries
Desert Tortoise: Fact or Fiction?
Here is a good game that will determine which team knows the most about the Sonoran Desert tortoise. There are 16 questions posed, and the answers are printed in bold for the benefit of the teacher. Question # 16 reads, "Desert tortoise...
Desert Museum
Daisy Ecology
Here's a fine instructional activity that combines poetry with life sciences. Learners carefully listen to a poem that's all about a food chain. As the poem is read, learners name the producer, the herbivore, the carnivore, and the...
Lied Center of Kansas
The Ugly Duckling and The Tortoise and the Hare
Both The Ugly Duckling and The Tortoise and the Hare are great additions to an elementary language arts lesson. Young readers focus on the literary elements of each story, including characters and plot development, and apply...
Curated OER
Buzz Up My Hive
Young scholars research bees. In this organisms activity, students participate in various learning centers to find out more about bees. The centers include watching a video and taking notes, reading books about bees, and going on a...
Curated OER
Strong to the Hoop
Students complete pre reading, writing, during reading, and interdisciplinary activities for the book Strong to the Hoop. In this reading lesson plan, students complete journal entries, go over vocabulary, answer short answer questions,...
Curated OER
What You See Is What You Read
Using the popular text Franklin Goes to the Hospital, youngsters make predictions by looking at the cover of the book. They draw their predictions, listen to the story, and compare their predictions to what actually happened in the...
Oklahoma Ag in The Classroom
Bee Smart Bee Happy
Here is a wonderfully designed lesson on bees and pollination designed for early elementary learners. After a class discussion on bees, pupils pretend to be a bee by picking up nectar off of "flowers" in the class. The flowers are...
Curated OER
Dolch Work Bingo
Students play Bingo using Dolch sight words on their game cards. In this sight word lesson, students create their own Bingo card, filling it out with dolch words from their provided list. When a student has gotten Bingo, the...
Curated OER
Sequencing / Story Events
Young scholars read a story and use sentence strips to order story events. In this sequencing lesson, students learn new vocabulary words centered around the story Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, preview the story, make...
Curated OER
Budget Hungry
Young elementary students create an expense budget for a meal at a restaurant. They learn the basic communication and etiquette skills needed to successfully go on a field trip to implement the budgets they created.
Curated OER
Pay It Forward Project
Create a list of random acts of kindness and have your class perform them during a designated week. Learners will also participate in a project centered around being kind to others. Each grade chooses their kindness project, and then...
Curated OER
What A Pair! A Cross Grade Writing Activity
What a pair! Older pupils interview younger ones and use what they learn to write a short, illustrated storybook that features the youngster as the main character. The youngster responds with a thank-you note in which they identify their...
Curated OER
Alternative Assessments for Novel Units
Students can be assessed on novel units using alternative/performance assessments.
Florida Center for Reading Research
Phonological Awareness: Phoneme Matching, Initial Phoneme Picture Sort
An activity focuses on phonemic awareness and initial letter sounds. Scholars sort picture cards by saying and matching the initial sounds each word makes.
Baylor College
Plant or Animal?
Teach your class about the necessities of life using the book Tillena Lou's Day in the Sun. After a teacher-read-aloud, students make puppets depicting different plants and animals from the story and illustrating the habitat in...
Baylor College
Bio Build-up
Trace pollutants through the environment in the seventh lesson of this series on the science of food. Looking at a picture of the plants and animals in an aquatic ecosystem, learners use dot stickers to represent harmful chemicals as...