"Who says a pen has to be called a pen? Why not call it a frindle?" Inspired by this quote from the award-winning novel written by Andrew Celements, this lesson allows children to invent their own...

Smart Solutions is the theme of a unit created to meet the needs of English language earners. Through a series of lessons, scholars follow a routine—move, speak, and listen— to cover topics including stores, shops, celebrations, pets,...

Support English language development with a family-themed unit consisting of a series of lessons designed to get your scholars moving, looking, speaking, writing, and listening. Conversation topics...

Here is a unit designed to support English language development. Scholars speak, move, and write to learn more about topics that focus on community and local concepts. The series of lessons aids to reinforce concepts...

Fourth graders work in small groups to become experts on different colonial trades in the eighth instructional activity of this unit. Working toward the long-term goal of writing a piece of historical fiction, young scholars read...

All sources are pretty much the same, right? If this is how your class views the sources they use for writing or research projects, present them with a media literacy lesson on smart source evaluation. Groups examine several articles,...

This activities in this packet, the second in the series of support materials for the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt thematic units on animal habitats, are designed specifically for English language learners.

Middle schoolers get hip to the jive with a activity about slang. They closely examine examples of slang and use context clues to infer the meaning of the terms. Groups read and summarize an article about a teacher who created a Gen Z...

Having a hard time defining bullying with your seventh graders? Discuss the different types of behavior one would see in a bullying situation with a series of lessons, worksheets, and group activities.

The purpose of this first lesson in a series of five about enfranchisement and suffrage is to determine what class members already know, or think they know, about voting and voter registration. Groups...

Finding engaging ways to help your middle schoolers build their vocabulary is not easy to do. The lesson presented here offers a great way to motivate them to build vocabulary by making it into a game. Teams of pupils use a dictionary...

Adjust the overlap to compare probabilities. Using sliders, learners adjust the shape of two Gaussian curves. The interactive calculates the area of the left tail for one curve and the right tail for the other. Pupils set the interactive...

Make sure the measurement is right. The interactive provides right triangles with a missing side measurement. Pupils use the given sides and the Pythagorean Theorem to calculate the length of the missing side. After entering the length,...

After a review of what suffixes are and how they are used, middle schoolers utilize a worksheet that is embedded in the plan to work in pairs to strengthen their understanding and skills in using these very important parts of our...

The fourth in a five-lesson unit examining human rights and personal responsibility asks class groups to investigate a current rights issue, and using the provided graphic organizer, summarize the issue, consider which rights are being...

Two online lessons, one in math and one in language arts, are here for you. In them, learners play online games which reinforce important skills in literacy and numeracy. The thing I like about both of these lessons is that they get the...

Middle schoolers engage in a lesson which reminds them that root words indicate the base meaning of a word, and that those roots are found in many different words that have similar meanings. Pairs of pupils use construction paper and...

Stanchion, spar, spinnaker. Right wing, sweeper, hip check. Every subject has specialized vocabulary. Here’s a fun way to introduce your learners to this jargon. Provide class groups with newspapers and have them search pre-selected...

Scholars demonstrate their knowledge of root words aqua and aud, and develop vocabulary skills by completing of a chart, handout, and worksheet using creative thinking skills, a dictionary, and a thesaurus.   

A phonics lesson focuses on morpheme structures—compound words. Pairs choose letter cards, identify a compound word that starts with that letter and write it on a whiteboard. Extension opportunities include additional practice pages.

Readers of Man's Search for Meaning use context clues, create stories using words from the text, and retype these stories as part of their vocabulary study of Viktor Frankl's book.

Walt Whitman's "Captain, My Captain" and Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" provide seventh graders with examples of odes. After reading and discussing these and other examples, young poets craft an ode and respond to the ode of a...

Spin into a dicey experiment. Pupils use a spinner or a pair of dice to determine the experimental probabilities of each outcome. The interactive allows for either, one, five, or ten consecutive experiments. Using the applet, learners...

Convert a table to probabilities. Pupils set up the winning rules for the sums of two dice. Using the rules, the applet fills out a table showing the winners for each combination. Learners determine the probabilities of winning for each...