As background for a reading of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, groups rotate through four stations (video, music, website, information) to gather information on the 1960s. In addition, they interview family members about the 1960s and...

Introduce S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders with a bell work journal that asks class members to define loyalty. Key words (patience, unity, honesty, caring, etc.), drawn from their musings, are posted around the room, and groups search for...

This plan aims to increase the reading proficiency of your fourth grade class. While no materials are provided, a list of activities to practice are included. Various activities include creating songs for short vowel sounds, using cue...

Young writers use technology and other media to research information on a chosen topic. They explore countries where keypals and e-mail friends are located. Using their writing skills, they correspond with their e-mail friend and...

Learners practice compassion. In this character education lesson, student read Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud. Students discuss the book as well as ways to demonstrate they care for one another. Learners fill buckets...

Students discover the horrible situation of water shortages that many people face by completing Peace Corps activities.  In this global health lesson, students analyze and discuss photographs of people in Africa struggling to find...

Put your common writing errors to rest with this resource, which prompts high schoolers to create eulogies and tombstones for overused and incorrect words. They work on correcting common errors in spelling and usage mistakes in their own...

Students design their own emblem. In this introduction lesson, students get to know one another by designing an emblem that combines symbols that represent themselves. They express themselves to their classmates. 

Why is visual literacy so important in understanding Maus? Introduce your class to basic elements of graphic novels with a game of pictionary. A list of 13 words are included, but you could potentially add some World War II-related...

What do families around the world have in common? Explore this theme through the popular animated film My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki. Over the course of two days, pupils view the film, pausing to discuss their own families and the...

Bring a lesson about Negro League Baseball to your Black history unit, or any other research unit throughout the year. While the lesson plan itself is simplistic, there are several good ideas that you could use, such as creating trading...

Young scholars work in the classroom and in the computer lab to produce a Personal Poetry Book.

Through a series of activities, children discover the differences between their lives and the lives of children in the 19th century. They research and compare roles and responsibilities (in general and among genders), forms of education,...

Older high schoolers use maps to study changes in society like migration, population loss, and economic shifts, and then connect events from historical events to present day mapping of their region (The resource focuses on Canada, but...

This lesson plan is more of a series of tips for you, the teacher, to implement when standardized testing comes around. The strongest component of this guide is that it invites the teacher to reflect on what worked the best, and what...

Students study the nutritional information on food labels and become familiar with the basic dietary needs of the human body. They write letters to food companies.

Use the internet to research the differences between families in the past and today. In groups, they identify the reponsibilities and roles of each member of the family. As a class, they compare and contrast non-fiction and fiction and...

Students examine the concept of kindness to others. They define kindness, listen to various stories about random acts of kindness, and create an e-mail chain describing their own acts of kindness that is sent around the world.

Students examine examples of writing samples from NCS Mentor and discuss with students what makes each writing piece earn points. They grade a writing sample on the program and discuss various simple machines and their components.

Over the course of a week, class groups interview one another, search for similarities and differences within the group, and then prepare a PowerPoint introduction of their group for the entire class. An interesting way to incorporate...

Students explore the purpose and requirements for a bibliography. They examine where to find bibliographic information in a variety of print and non-print sources on an assigned topic. Students prepare a bibliography online using a...

Young scholars explore interactive web sites to improve their editing and proofreading skills. Using the SMART Board, students identify capitalization and punctuation errors in a given sentence. Young scholars discuss proofreading...

High schoolers examine the United States at the turn of the century. Using primary source documents, they interpret them within a specific historical context. Using this information, they write a poem with metaphors and a specific meter...

Fourth graders review a fictional book in which they give an overview of the characters and storyline. Microsoft Word is used to type a final draft of their review and to create a cover page with a picture.