Expose young children to the wonderful works of author and illustrator Jan Brett using a few of her stories such as Armadillo Rodeo, The Mitten, or Daisy Comes Home through a unit study. 

Whether you are viewing a landscape painting of a farm, examining a still-life portrait of a bowl of fruit, or reading a descriptive poem about cultivating food, you can't deny that agriculture plays a major role in visual and language...

As part of their study of the Progressive Era, class groups examine a 20th century version of "The Three Little Pigs" through a New Era lens and identify how ideals such as the value of hard work, creativity, and problem solving,...

Strap on those backpacks, it's time to travel through history with this literature unit based on the first four books of The Magic Tree House series. While reading through these fun stories, children create story maps, record...

Here is a nice set of activities and discussion questions to accompany your class reading of No Pretty Pictures, a memoir of a young girl's experiences and struggle for survival during the Holocaust.

It's rational to root for your class to learn about exponents. Scholars study rational exponents by reading a fictional dialogue between classmates. They analyze the conversation to understand the connection between rational exponents...

What caused the collapse of the environment on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)? Who constructed the Moai? What was their purpose? Class members assume the role of investigators and use evidence drawn from field studies, ships' logs, and...

A lesson challenges scholars to analyze editorial cartoons created by Fred Seibel, illustrator for the Times-Dispatch, during the Massive Resistance. A class discussion looking at today's editorial pages and Jim Crow Laws leads the...

After reading Chicken Soup with Rice, by Maurice Sendak, incorporate some of these great extension activities into your lesson plan. Ideas include focusing on knowing the months of the year, or studying the illustrations and how...

Accompany a reading of First Come the Zebra written and illustrated by Lynne Barasch with a teacher's guide equipped with before reading, vocabulary, and after reading activities. Additional social studies,...

It is easy to forget the power that written or spoken word can have in effecting change. Using quotations from such inspirational leaders as Maya Angelou, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., encourage your class members to...

What a creative and engaging project to incorporate into your studies of the 1920s! Your young historians will work in groups to design a magazine discussing the political and cultural topics of the decade, each member writing one...

What famous children's author and illustrator created World War II political cartoons featuring such subjects as fascism, the war effort, discrimination, and the dangers of isolationism? The who in this story is Dr. Seuss, and what...

"Love it or leave it." "You're either for us or against us." Rhetoric and it's polarizing effects are the focus of a lesson that uses John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry as an exemplar. Groups examine primary source documents,...

This teaching guide for Love That Dog and Hate That Cat includes suggestions for how to integrate Sharon Creech's books into a poetry unit, as well as writing activities, discussion questions, and tips for making poetry...

Drawn by promises of fertile land, thousands of settlers poured West because of the Homestead Act of 1862. By examining images of the ads that drew them westward, learners consider the motivations for movement. They also consider how the...

Explore the sounds, importance, and effectiveness of dialect in literature.  Active participants read, listen to poetry, and explore dialect by developing a formal definition, discuss the benefits of its use, complete a Venn diagram...

Encourage close reading of the text and a focus on how Sandra Cisneros' develops her characters with an activity that asks teams to sort, group, and label character descriptions from The House on Mango Street.

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...

Have you used the directed reading thinking activity in your classroom? Doubling as either a prereading strategy, or a during reading strategy, it helps readers connect the historical background of the text to the text itself. As the...

Young voyagers face the challenge of the wide dark sea, travel with Yunmi and Halmoni, and even get trapped by the ice as they explore the reading selections offered in these enrichment activities designed for the Houghton...