Here's a fresh approach that combines research, business and personal letter writing, and creative story telling. Student groups research different decades in the life of a famous Japanese astronomer. They then craft a decade fact sheet,...

If you are planning a unit on memoir and autobiographical narrative, you should consider this resource. Using Internet research skills, pupils review works by James Frey and Henry David Thoreau. In response to these works, learners...

Middle schoolers investigate the lives of birds by writing about their favorite species.  In this animal life lesson, students research a science book and web to discover the characteristics of many types of birds.  Middle...

Seventh graders write a few sentences explaining the most important events of their lives during the past year. As a class, they discuss why they chose the elements they did for their sentences. To end the lesson plan, they read a...

Explore the chemistry behind the airbags that keep you safe in a collision. Using a simulation, your classes find the best gas to use to inflate an airbag. The simulation shows the time it takes to inflate to a maximum volume....

Don't assume your pupils understand assumptions. A teacher resource provides valuable information on inferences, assumptions, and conditions, and how scholars tend to overlook these aspects. It focuses on regression analysis, statistical...

Young scholars collect rocks found locally and write a brief description which includes the name of the rock, whether the rock is sedimentary, metamorphic, or igneous, and what uses the rock has. They exchange rocks with another class in...

Explore the effect of outliers through an analysis of mean, median, and standard deviation. Your classes examine and compare these measures for two groups. They must make sense of a group that has a higher mean but lower median compared...

Visualize osmosis using an interactive activity. As learners monitor a simulation, they witness the particle movement through the membrane. A balloon represents the cellular membrane and 'pops' as osmosis creates an imbalance of...

Can you justify that mathematically?  Help learners see the process of solving as using mathematical properties rather than a set of steps to memorize in the fourth module of a nine-part Algebra I series. The module contains six...

Consider how well students' favorite TV shows, movies and video games reflect the diversity of society. The lesson introduces your class to several media literacy concepts, such as how media conveys values and messages, as well as the...

Students explore language arts by writing their own poems. In this haiku lesson, students investigate the Japanese culture and their beautiful music, poetry and art. Students count the syllables in every line of a haiku poem and write...

Beginning botanists view slides of plant vascular tissue. They watch Magic School Bus Gets Planted, which you can find online, and then write a summary of what they have learned about plants. This lesson could be used with upper...

Test your pupils' reasoning skills with several activities and a quick mystery to solve. Learners watch and analyze a few video clips that demonstrate reasoning in action, practice deduction with an interactive and collaborative...

Jump back into expository writing and analysis at the start of a new school year! Start with a review of an authors' stylistic choices in diction, syntax, treatment of subject matter, and figurative language. Writers choose a text to...

Students work together to write a Constitution for their classroom. As a class, they discuss the need for laws and how the concept of compromise is important. In groups, they compare the process they used for writing the Constitution...

Students observe the life cycle of the common flour beetle and make observations of its life stages. They also design and implement an investigation on food preference for the beetle and record data over a period of several months....

Although this legislative process activity is designed to accompany a specific text, it is valuable independently. Young learners participate in a picture walk (worksheet included) through My Senator and Me:...

Finished your novel? What’s next? Designing the book cover, of course. But how to begin? After examining the covers of published books and noting the common elements of these jackets, young novelists design a front and back cover for...

Don't be caught in the dark! Young scientists investigate the causes of both solar and lunar eclipses using an interactive to help them understand the development of an eclipse over time. They then research facts and characteristics...

De-icing materials may have a harmful effect on our environment; have your class perform an experiment to test the nature of these effects. Scholars monitor the survival rate of a sample of daphnia as the concentration of a de-icing...

The risk of contracting an infection in the hospital is low, but it does happen. Learn what risk factors have the highest correlation with hospital-acquired infections in the final lesson of a three-part series. Using the open source R...

Learn the stories a formula holds. An interesting lesson takes a unique approach to teach how to use formulas. Beginning with a formula, learners predict what the variables stand for and then use the formula to make calculations and tell...

Discover the connection between vectors and translations. Through the lesson, learners see the strong relationship between vectors, matrices, and translations. Their inquiries begin in the two-dimensional plane and then progress to the...