A six-week unit takes high schoolers through various works of African-American literature, including poems, plays, and short stories. The lesson plan format includes a week-by-week description of activities, goals, materials, and...

For this Using Supply and Demand worksheet, students draw curves and diagrams, make predictions about graphs, solve problems, and answer questions.

Have your class take a look at the macroeconomy. Learners answer several questions using sound economic reasoning to support their responses. Students then graph information.

How does recognizing the author's purpose help you draw conclusions about a topic? Using two articles (both are attached), learners brainstorm why each author wrote each article. Are their purposes similar or different? Learners use a...

Young scholars examine how to locate and access data sets.  In this climate change lesson students import data into Excel and graph it.   

Shakespeare's Macbeth (Act II, Scenes I and II) lacks explicit details of the murder of King Duncan, yet the author creates an atmosphere that allows us to visualize the event. Readers interpret the "Dagger Speech" by writing stage...

Teach kids how to watch television, specifically the news, with this creative idea for learners of all ages from the Media Awareness Network. The elementary school plan focuses on presenting news as a story and uses Jon Scieszka's story...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn continues to be one of the most frequently banned books. The satire and social commentary present challenges when using the book as a core text. Direct readers' attention to how Twain uses plot,...

Two fish appear different, but how do scientists determine their genotypes? Scholars practice performing test crosses to determine the genotypes of fish given their phenotypes. They answer in-depth comprehension questions and complete...

James Hurst's short story "The Scarlet Ibis" provides eighth graders with an opportunity to sharpen their literary analysis skills. After a close reading of the text, class members highlight and annotate parts of the dialogue and...

Learners annotate text from The Great Gatsby before working through a character development map. They then use text evidence in a final essay to describe the connection between central ideas and character development.

Liliana Heker's "The Stolen Party" and Martha Salinas' "The Scholarship Jacket" provide sixth graders with an opportunity to identify key scenes that authors use to develop their themes.

The famous words of Martin Luther King still resonate with scholars today. An enlightening lesson helps pupils examine the "I Have a Dream" speech in more depth and learn what impact it had on the civil rights movement. Young historians...

Scientists use data to learn about species survival—and your classes can too! A set of four lessons guides learners through a process to draw conclusions about the fluctuations in the population of the Hellbender species. They read...

Working in groups, pupils plot three points on the coordinate plane representing three different parabolic paths. Using a calculator, they determine the quadratic regression equation for their models. Each team then figures out the...

Power to the people who understand electricity. A simple experiment teaches pupils how to set up an electric circuit that includes a solar module and how to measure voltage and current using a multimeter. They calculate power and...

In the effort to soothe the suffering of the Great Depression, New Deal programs funded a variety of approaches - including a theater project that proved controversial! Using documents such as oral histories, as well as photographs of...

Working in teams, pairs, or individually, scholars select one resource from a gallery of historical sources and consider which examples might be considered propaganda, the techniques used to persuade audiences, and evaluate how the...

Young journalists use the E.S.C.A.P.E. (evidence, source, context, audience, purpose, and execution) strategy to evaluate historical and contemporary examples of bias in the news. The class then uses the provided discussion questions to...

One only has to watch MSMBC and FOX News to realize that media can present the same story in very different ways. Middle schoolers have an opportunity to test their ability to determine the validity and trustworthiness of information by...

Historical events can be viewed from multiple perspectives. This simple truth is brought home in a lesson that examines primary source documents related to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny,...

Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" is the anchor text in a lesson that asks high schoolers to find examples of cause, effect, and foreshadowing in the tale. They then create a brochure advertising trips with Time Travel, Inc.

Here is a lesson that provides scholars with two opportunities to stretch their compare-and-contrast muscles. First, learners compare and contrast their experience reading the fourth stanza of If by Rudyard Kipling to listening to the...

Refugee & Immigrant Transitions is an organization that helps newcomers adjust to life in the United States through education and community leadership opportunities. As part of a mid-unit assessment, pupils independently read a...