Have Fun Teaching
Identifying Author's Purpose
The multi-lesson, 47-page packet contains everything you need to ensure kids can recognize the clues provided to identify the type of text, the intended audience, and the author's purpose in writing the passage.
Curated OER
Rituals, Scapegoats, and Mobs...Oh My!
One way to teach "The Lottery," a suspenseful and rich short story by Shirley Jackson.
Santa Ana Unified School District
The Giver
Wouldn't it be great to live an a community without pain, without danger? Such a society is the goal of the community in The Giver. Using Lois Lowry's dystopian novel as the core text, class members read primary source materials about...
Baruch College Writing Center
Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting Workshop
What's the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing? Show class members how to find the main ideas from informational text and condense it, restate it, or quote it directly with a series of educational activities based on two...
Curated OER
Strong Convictions
How can the rhetorical structure of an editorial help to develop its argument? Use this New York Times editorial to emphasize the importance of structure in a piece of informational text. Adolescent writers then use the editorial as a...
Curated OER
Note Taking By Crayon
Skim a brief biography of Amelia Earhart with your class, and then assign groups of researchers one of four topics listed: Amelia's family life, important airplane flights during Amelia's life, turning points in Amelia's life, and...
Civil War Trust
Genealogy
The Civil War is undoubtedly a part of America's history, but could it be part of your pupils' history as well? Middle schoolers conduct research to discover a connection between their ancestors and the American Civil War. Whether they...
Mr. Nussbaum
Battle of Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter, the site of the Civil War's first battle, taught the Union and the Confederacy an important lesson: they would both need to take stronger steps than anticipated if they wanted to win the war. History pupils read about the...