Assertive communication is an acquired skill. Teaching young people to ask for what they need and to believe that they have a right to ask is at the core of a unit on assertive communication. Over the course of the unit, middle and high...

An executive is not just a leader of a company; you can also use the term to describe the president of the United States. The ninth part of a 20-part unit teaches high schoolers about the importance of the executive branch and the...

Middle schoolers are introduced to the concept of three Abrahamic religions and complete the Comparative Religion Exercise. They view slides after taking their best guesses and read the article, "The Path to Peace Runs Through a History...

In our increasingly visual society, it is often difficult for some readers to create a mental picture of a picture created only with words. An image-rich text like F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby can therefore, present a real...

Encourage readers of Nightjohn, Gary Paulsen's young adult novel about slavery set shortly before the Civil War, to develop their categorization and organizational skills with a strategy that asks them to list all the words they can...

Although graphing a linear inequality on the plane is but a few steps added onto the graphing of a linear equation, for many learners the logical leap is quite intimidating. This approachable PowerPoint presentation breaks graphing...

What is the net effect when two waves interfere with each other? The lesson plan answers this question by helping the class visualize waves through graphing. Pupils graph individual waves and determine the effect of the interference...

Teach your readers how to engage with a text by using the request strategy. As kids read Antoine de Saint Éxupery's The Little Prince, they choose a passage of text and formulate questions to stump their partners or their...

Many 12th graders will say they want to go to college, but they don't know how they'll pay for it. Prepare them for a life of learning by giving them the tools they need to get through school. After a financial aid debriefing session,...

Future leaders engage in a modified of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" game to gain insight into their approach to leadership. At the end of the game, participants were asked to consider whether they were focused on winning the game or on...

By using explicit textual evidence, individuals can strongly support their ideas and opinions. The presentation suggests in order to use explicit textual evidence, one must state their idea, cite evidence in the text that led...

If you use the resource, then pupils will understand conditional block instructions. In the first lab of a six-part unit, pupils learn how to use conditional statements (if/then) in block instructions for computer programming. They apply...

Your plants will survive without you. Scholars create a device that can water plants using a coiled string. Along the way, they learn about adhesion and cohesion of water. The challenge is to keep the plants alive for at least a week.

Where to begin? With the vocational education that provides the skills necessary to gain economic security or with a Liberal Arts education? As part of a study of leaders of the civil rights movement, class members compare and...

Here is part one of a two-part lesson in which scholars investigate the changing states of water—liquid, solid, and gas. With grand conversation and up to three demonstrations, learners make predictions about what they think will happen...

Develop concepts on how to change your improving wordsmiths' writing from blah to wow with the activities and ideas in this resource. The instructor provides the class with examples of writing that lacks detail and precision, and then...

Eight various activities have your learners looking at hype in the media. Advertisements for films, politics, music, and philanthropy all contribute to emotional appeals and marketing strategies trying to convince consumers to...

Investigate ways to persuade by introducing learners to the three rhetorical appeals (Pathos, Logos, Ethos). Pupils receive a worksheet for their definition development of the terms and coinciding vocabulary words. The activity continues...

After reading "The Bullet," a particularly intense chapter in Victor Martinez's Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, class members listen to the Spanish and the English versions of "Dimelo" by Enrique Iglesias. They then discuss how the...

Sorting objects according to their initial sound get scholars thinking about letter-sound correspondence. With 26 brown bags labeled with a letter of the alphabet, learners browse magazines and cut out images that begin with the...

Math, reading, writing, and word work; it's all here in a daily lesson plan created to support a substitute teacher in a fifth grade class. 

If you are new to the technique of Socratic questioning, check out this resource that details the five steps in the Socratic method. The examples of each step are drawn from Brave New World.

This activity gets at the heart of algebraic reasoning and setting up equations with one variable to solve real-world problems. The worksheet has only one problem, but it requires that learners first use their own reasoning...

A presidential election is a lot like the 2004 World Series, and it's also a lot like choosing an orange in a paper bag. Apply the process of the electoral college to these two analogies with a set of lessons about government...