Visit the Magic Treehouse and take your class on a trip through time with a reading of the children's book Mummies in the Morning. Using the story to spark an investigation into Egyptian culture, this literature unit engages...

Read and examine primary source material in order to analyze, synthesize, and debate information about the Great Depression. Critical analysts research various source materials related to the Great Depression. They work in teams to...

Bully, bullied, or bystander? Paul Langan's The Bully is the anchor text in a unit that examines bullying and violence. After a close reading of the text, readers imagine themselves as the characters and consider how they would react in...

High schoolers create maquettes of abstract sculptures utilizing the elements of art; line, shape, value, color, space and texture and the principles of design; balance, emphasis, contrast, rhythm and movement, pattern and unity. These...

Have your class analyze the narrative art in quilts. They identify elements in this domestic art and the stories they tell. They define a story quilt, view an example, and analyze the work of Harriet Power. This is a great lesson to...

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...

Individuals complete a pre-assessment to gauge their ability to determine the main idea and supporting details in nonfiction text. They examine a new piece of nonfiction reading by looking at the table of contents, headings, and index...

Students examine works of art to develop an understanding of the importance of visual balance in works of art and nature. Students research artists and their artwork for examples of visual balance. Students create works of art showing...

So many shapes in our vast oceans. Young explorers can discover new shapes in a variety of ways in this lesson. One way is having free exploration with a pattern shape kit handed out by the teacher. Another is by viewing a...

Students investigate syllabic metre and rhyming techniques by analyzing poetry.  In this language arts lesson plan, students read the poem Considering the Snail and discuss the nature and mood of the poem with their classmates....

Readers identify main ideas and supporting details using informational texts. In this literacy lesson, they make predictions and read the text to find the main ideas. They use a table diagram to define the main idea and supporting...

Gather some information, print it onto sentence strips, and then have your class physically shuffle the cards to better understand the importance of organizational patterns in writing. Middle school learners examine information for a...

Youngsters listen to the story of Gregory the Terrible Eater and write a similar story using the same pattern. In the new book, Herman is requested to eat things that are nouns. They must supply the correct part of speech for the class...

What is the artist's role in the post 9/11 world? How do artists use imagery to convey meaning in their work? After examining the work of Mughal artist Imran Qureshi, class members create their own work that uses combative imagery to...

Students explore the influence of the landscape of Ireland on shaping the poetry of William Butler Yeats. They work in groups researching the growth of the Irish Nationalist Movement, Celtic origins, invasions, and the impact on the...

Students survey free jazz and fusion. They explore how free jazz and fusion reflected American culture and society in the 1960s and 1970s.

Students, assessing a variety of formatting tools with Microsoft Word, utilize a bank of vocabulary words to make a personal dictionary of nouns. They classify nouns for people, places, things and ideas and separate them into common and...

Explore plot structure by analyzing text samples with writers. They define terms such as problem and solution, cause and effect, and story arc. They also identify the sequences used in modern stories by reading samples and determining...

Groups research participatory democracies and compare the role and rights of citizens in ancient history with those in recent U.S. history. Guided by a series of questions, individuals compose a persuasive essay in which they discuss the...

Students research the evolution and cultural significance of the Arabic ghazal form of poetry. They, in groups, compose an original ghazal poem and read it aloud to the class.

Discover stories about women's history in beautiful stained glass windows. The second in a three-part series teaches scholars about a famous artistic style of stained glass windows and the influential women that used art to impact...

A comprehensive and immersive series of lessons that examines various aspects of story development leads learners into writing a narrative of their own. Writers develop an understanding of the writing process as they use the learning...

High schoolers evaluate several works by Edgar Allen Poe based on the criteria in his essay, "The Philosophy of Composotion" Their analysis is documented using a graphic organizer. Learners begin the pre-writing process for their own...

A great cross-curricular project for any art classroom, this activity encourages young artists to consider color, pattern, texture, shape and line in their depiction of a historical figure. After researching a historical figure of their...