Close your colonial America unit with a performance-based assessment. Class members will show their proficiency in several skills including using details to back up inferences, determining the meaning of words in context,...

Encourage your young writers to thoughtfully plan and organize their work. First, model how this is done and vocalize your thought process as you work. Next, create a class list of strategies that they can use during independent writing...

It's important that writers leave their readers with a strong and satisfying conclusion. Help your young writers develop the skills to compose a concluding sentence with the steps outlined here. After class members have had a chance to...

Provide time to polish paragraphs in class. Pupils, who have been working on these informational pieces for several days now, will have a chance to check for spelling and grammar before publishing their work. Sure to be a rewarding final...

Reading is fantastic, especially when it's reading about bullfrogs. Kids get cozy with predator/prey relationships as they hone their information-reading skills. They start out as they read a portion of the text aloud, then they...

Ready, set, write! Scholars work on the end-of-unit assessment by completing a writing prompt. They then look at the model performance task from instructional activity two to create a rubric for scoring the exercise. Using turn and talk,...

Time to pick a side! Building on the Fishbowl activity from the previous instructional activity, scholars choose a position about whether the American Academy of Pediatrics should raise its screen time recommendations. Using notes,...

There's nothing like a good theme! After reviewing the story of Cronus, learners participate in a mini instructional activity about theme by pulling papers from an envelope and identifying the writing on it as either a topic or a...

There's more to newspaper articles than meets the eye. Scholars learn the different features of a newspaper article, including headline, byline, subheadings, etc. Pupils circle the features in an article as the teacher discusses their...

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.   

Introduce your Language high schoolers to the culture and 19th century German custom of serving coffee and cake at small parties. They read old cookbooks, sort recipes, prepare foods, compare old German recipes to recipes from home and...

What the weather like today? How about in other countries? In Celsius and Fahrenheit? Have your learners use the Internet to look up the weather in Spanish! They'll discuss their findings in Spanish with a partner and create a chart over...

Use the popular theme of sharks to discuss complete sentences and sentence fragments with your language arts class. This is a great, interactive exercise to get all of your learners involved. Consider pairing kids up in teams to create...

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address provides the text for a series of close reading exercises that model for instructors how carefully crafted guiding questions can help readers think critically about what they read, thus developing...

What a comprehensive resource! This workbook includes six separate units on writing. Learners begin with printing and then move on to cursive. The handwriting sheets include plenty of practice with letters, numbers, and symbols. Each...

Young readers can be exposed to the literary works of Mark Twain as they interact with challenging text and gain experience by reading the complex passages of chapter two "The Glorious Whitewasher" from his famous book, The Adventures of...

Young potters make their very own version of the classic Navajo Pottery. With helpful worksheets and applicable cross-curricular activities, the lesson is an enriching way to mold both your clay and the multicultural...

Prepare participants for a Socratic seminar by asking them to not only design questions for the discussion, but to also observe an assigned partner during the seminar. A great way to encourage student-led discussions.

A thorough lesson plan takes your first grade class through Jane Yolen's beautiful Owl Moon. It crafts the unit with clear objectives, high-level guiding questions, cloze activities and sentence frames, and extension...

Foster community in your classroom and encourage learners to get up and get to know each other. Individuals each receive the classmate inventory handout included and use it to fill in information about their fellow scholars. Once they...

Shocking! After viewing a short clip from the 1931 movie, Frankenstein and reviewing electricity references in Mary Shelley's novel, class members examine Luigi Galvani's and Alessandro Volta's observations on electricity and muscle...

Aspiring journalists learn about media literacy, journalism, and the press. Units come complete with handouts, assignment rubrics, notes, and extension suggestions. Each unit also comes with a list of vocabulary words and learning...

Should a criminal's punishment match the crime? An argumentative writing plan explores this question as class members investigate a variety of mixed-medium sources by experts in the field, form evidence-based claims, and support them...

Learners dance the image of falling snow. They move, swing, fall, and rise to music working to depict snow falling, the sun, and high/low movements. This is a well-thought out lesson that aids them in seeing movement as a form of...