Students examine a poster of Brown v. Board of Education and discuss what the important details are. They read the story behind the poster and court case. They role play different sections of the case such as the court case or Linda...

How does background and experience influence one's point of view? Dwight Okita's famous poem about the Japanese internment is the text used to explore this essential question. Class members study primary documents to gain the necessary...

Students examine the Brown v. Board of Education case in Topeka, Kansas. They re-enact the courtroom and discuss how school would be different today if this case never existed. They discuss how public education has been affected by this...

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...

Are your advanced learners reading authentic Latin this year? Whether you're teaching Caesar, Cicero or Virgil, use some of these strategies to map out your unit. What do you focus on? Consider taking small passages and making that the...

Set in Oklahoma in the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath presents a powerful view of life during the Great Depression. An insightful lesson plan takes a closer look at the characters in John Steinbeck's classic novel, combining the...

Your pupils may not know that school was not always required. Teach them a bit about the history of public education with a reading passage and related questions.

Have your class design their own mathematical study aids. Learners collaborate in groups on the design of tri-fold presentation describing the relationships between mathematical computations. Then, they write a business letter to the...

Engage your English learners with this resource. To begin, learners describe a map to a partner. After a vocabulary exercise and a jumbled letter activity, pupils are asked to write their own letter. The letter reading and writing...

Can your class figure out who said what just by looking at a quotation? This activity for Of Mice and Men includes 11 quotations from the novel. Use this quote sheet as a light activity to get your readers to look back into the text or...

Imagine a tool that magically engages readers in the classroom. A handbook for Indiana educators doesn't guarantee success, but it does offer a variety of strategies for teachers to try. The handbook opens with research-based theory...

In 1941 FDR spoke out on the events at Pearl Harbor. The class will get to analyze word choice,  word meaning, author's craft and structure by analyzing an actual draft of this speech. They will look critically at the words used,...

Although the article that launches this lesson is about the history of the Periodic Table, the objective is reading comprehension. Using the eight-page informational text, learners answer five comprehension questions and craft one essay....

Students examine the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended segregation. They role play to re-enact the case and discuss why it was important. They discover its impact on public education.

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your. country.” Did you know that John Kenneth Galbraith, Adlai Stevenson, and Theodore Sorensen helped John F. Kennedy craft his 1961...

Young learners develop a deeper understanding of target vocabulary. In pairs, pupils independently complete a series of word clue cards, asking them to find information about key terms, including their definitions, synonyms, antonyms,...

Go over digraphs, vowel sounds, and affixes with a series of decoding and spelling lessons. Each lesson guides learners through a different reading and phonics skill, building on the lesson before, and challenging them with each step.

Dissect the parts of an advertisement with your class. Middle schoolers discuss advertisements and locate the hook in them. Then, they create an advertisement for a business, in which they include the name of the business, an...

Students gain an understanding of how systems and organs in the human body work. They create their own fictional account of a trip through the human body, and describe one response the body makes to stimuli.

Elementary schoolers read many tall tales. They create their own tall tale about a specific event of their choosing. They must act the part of the author. This well-designed lesson takes three class sessions to complete, and is...

To prepare for crafting their own memoir, class members examine poetry by Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, Robert Hayden, and Claude McKay, stories by Richard Rodriquez and Willa Cather, and Barry Levinson's film Avalon. They examine...

Everyone takes a different journey through grief. A series of lesson plans for the novel Counting by 7s introduces readers to the main character who loses her parents in a car crash. Discussion questions and writing prompts combine...

Growing writers explore what it takes to develop and support a thesis statement with pre-fabricated ideas provided by the Virginia Department of Education. Learners take notes on what makes a thesis statement and a topic sentence, and...

Young scholars dig through dictionaries to uncover the wealth of information they provide. Using the included graphic organizer, children learn about target words by finding their parts of speech, pronunciation, definition, synonyms, and...