Curated OER
Individuality vs. Conformity
Have your middle schoolers participate in numerous activities designed to spark their awareness of literature. They express ideas and concerns clearly and respectfully in conversations and group discussions. Next, they view a music...
Curated OER
Number Patterns in Everyday Life
Examine scenarios involving number patterns. Learners complete a series of activities, including working with Pascal's triangle ando completing chart activities based on different pricing for pizza toppings. An included extension has...
Curated OER
Treasure Tales
Create an artifact kit to engage your young learners. Then, assign small groups a section of chapter three. They will identify the main idea and three supporting details for their section. Then, they select one artifact from the kit that...
Curated OER
EU Simulation: The European Council
Discover how government and the European Union works with this interactive activity. Small groups form to represent a country and create a profile. The instructor presents an issue to discuss and potential politicians then develop...
Media Smarts
Looking at Newspapers: Introduction
A scavenger hunt introduces class groups to the different sections of newspapers and the different types of articles found in each section.
Curated OER
Interaction as Analysis: Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers” is the focus of a series of activities that model for learners how close reading can lead to understanding. The whole class plays with the metaphor, groups talk about the author’s...
Curated OER
Find 1
Extend your class's ability to represent unit fractions on a number line with this challenging worksheet. Given two number lines, one labeled with zero and 1/4, the other with zero and 5/3, students must accurately locate the number one...
EduGAINs
Community Involvement Investigation— Guidance and Career Education
Not only do extracurricular activities look good on a college application, they can foster important life skills. From sports to volunteering to employment, extracurricular activities can inform your learners' experiences later in life....
NASA
Exploration of a Problem: Making Sense of the Elements
When given too much data to simply memorize, it helps to sort it into manageable groups. The second lesson in the six-part series of Cosmic Chemistry challenges groups of pupils to take a large amount of data and figure out how to best...
Curated OER
What's Outside the Window
What do your students see when they look outside the window? This project lets their imagination go wild, and lets you see what kind of daydreaming they do best. They each draw, paint, and color an image of what they imagine as they are...
Curated OER
Levers and Wedges in the Human Body
Students identify the various parts of the body that serve as wedges and levers, identifying the fulcrum for each body lever. They bite into carrots and apples to analyze how their jaws and teeth work, then complete three worksheets that...
Curated OER
Light, Colors, and Vision
Third graders experience optic illusions by creating flipbooks. In this optics lesson, 3rd graders view a demonstration of the workings of rods and cones using a camera. They are shown an optical illusion and work to create their own...
Illustrative Mathematics
3-D Shape Sort
From the apple on your desk and the coffee cup in your hand, to the cabinets along the classroom wall, basic three-dimensional shapes are found everywhere in the world around us. Introduce young mathematicians to the these common figures...
Main Memory Network
Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith" and Whitman's "Song of Myself"
Although the work Americans do has changed over time, the plight of the American worker has largely remained the same. Facilitate a class discussion aboutAmerican workers using Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith" and...
Curated OER
A Practical Experiment In Colonization
Role-play and simulation exercises are fantastic ways to help learners understand the reality behind many social and historical events. Pretending they are colonists, upper graders choose a location, create a history, establish laws, and...
Curated OER
The Bill of Rights is for US Today
The first ten Amendments of the U.S. Constitution are vital for young people to understand. Provide the foundation of the laws that govern our country with this junior high school lesson. Groups use the newspaper to identify rights...
Curated OER
The Scoop Through Desktop Publication
Drafting, revising, and editing is all apart of the publishing process. Using a series of documents as inspiration, young journalists compose a class Newspaper. They work independently and in groups to publish their own articles.
Curated OER
Put Your Truss in Building Bridges
Young scholars apply abstract concepts, such as stress, fulcrums, the law of gravity, and the strength of different geometric shapes. Groups of student contractors operate simulated architectural firms to create strong, economical bridges.
Curated OER
Tiling the Classroom
Students see how to identify regular polygons, how to slide, turn and flip polygons, and why certain polygons tessellate better than others. Groups create a one foot square design to be used to tile the classroom. Great lesson!
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Cracking the Code
Some interesting reading on the history of barcodes opens this technology lesson plan. Readers find out how engineers contribute, and then they gather into groups to discuss possible improvements to our current UPC barcode system. Know...
Peace Corps
What's Mongolia Really Like?
Understanding different cultural experiences is a challenging and worthwhile objective throughout grade and content levels. This lesson facilitates an appreciation of rural Mongolian life through a simulation of being a nomadic teen as...
Curated OER
Picture Perfect Poetry
Do your language arts students love to draw? Use this instructional activity to reinforce poetic techniques with illustration. After drawing what they think poem would look like with no words, middle and high schoolers work on several...
Curated OER
Introduction to the History of the Holocaust
The Holocaust is unbelievable! Examine this piece of history with your class. Using the Internet, research groups determine the relevance of information presented, compare how different sites present the same information, synthesize...
Curated OER
Measure Mania
Groups of students rotate through five classroom stations to estimate, measure, and record volume, length, weight, mass, and area using both customary and metric measure. They evaluate their data to determine how close their estimates...