Only a thorough understanding of history can save us from repeating it. Practice close reading skills with an eighth grade unit that focuses on 19th century America, including European immigration into Ellis Island and Frederick...

Close reading doesn't mean to literally read text close to your face, but rather to pay attention to particular details in order to develop a deep and purposeful understanding of text. The first part of a five-part resource provides an...

What important facts about Dr. Seuss influenced the Read Across America movement...? This is the driving question of a research project that requires scholars to find information about Dr. Seuss' life and work. Class...

Analyze magazines as a class, looking carefully for the target audience, advertisements, and topics presented. Small groups then work as a publication team and receive a magazine that they have to "sell." Each individual has a different...

Third graders investigate guide words. For this library lesson, 3rd graders investigate guide words in reference materials and complete an alphabetizing worksheet.

Explore ethnicity and identity with a research and writing assignment. Class members conduct online research, looking in particular at images and carefully noting down their sources on notecards. They read about identity and compose...

Bring your class's study skills into the 21st century with this digital teaching tool. Offering an easy way to create and share customized sets of flash cards with students, parents, and other educators, this resource is a...

Ready to prepare young scholars for their first placement test experience? Give them the support they need using a test-focused instructional activity. Fifth in a series of six junior-level college and career readiness instructional...

Keyboarding is one of the most basic skills needed to master modern technology, and it's also one of the most important. The class uses Century 21 Keyboarding and Information Processing to guide their hands in typing a report in the...

What is and what will be the role of newspapers in the future? Keeping this essential question in mind, class members use print, electronic, and/or web editions of newspapers, to investigate topics that include financial...

The options are vast with this Ancient Greece and Olympics research project! Using Scholastic online resources, historians have interactive and educational supports to guide them through researching and writing about the 2004 Olympics in...

The Internet is known as the information superhighway, but sometimes it's hard to know when to hit the brakes on unreliable sources. Using a well-rounded lesson plan, pupils read and summarize articles about the gender pay gap and...

Stress the importance of authenticating online resources and understanding the sources of websites' information with this activity. Using a Web-based activity, the lesson prompts young learners to think critically about determining the...

Once you've entered effective search terms, how do you evaluate the results of your search? Through the presentation and activities included here, pupils will examine results pages and determine what guiding information is provided. By...

After reading Elvira Woodruff's George Washington's Socks, young readers and writers embark upon writing their own historically based story, with a focus on developing ideas and details throughout the piece. In small groups, class...

Research was very different in the past. Pupils once had difficulty finding sufficient information, but now they have the opposite problem. Show your class how to pick the best resources out of the millions of sites an online search will...

Middle schoolers will paraphrase a resource without plagiarizing. Then rewrite after reading text. They then evaluate the site or reference they are using for accuracy. In the end, they complete a note-taking organizer.

After reading Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and discussing background material about domestic violence, class members create a map showing where in their community survivors of domestic violence can get help and...

Note-taking is an essential study skill, and it needs to be taught! In the context of a research project on energy sources, learners find multiple sources, evaluating, paraphrasing, and citing them correctly. Two lists with note-taking...

Get kids re-oriented to the computer lab for back-to-school. The constructivist approach in this session allows children to exert ownership of their behavior in the computer lab. Read aloud a few books about good and poor manners, as...

An interesting resource that might work best in an upper level art course, this handout provides a list of nine websites where young artists can read and study about all forms of art. These online resources range from a dictionary of...

Students investigate the customs and habits of other cultures by reading letters from a Peace Corps Volunteer.  In this global customs lesson, students discuss how analyzing a culture is similar to analyzing art, no two people see...

Show your pupils how to use guiding questions to help them focus their research into a topic. Using the framework provided by these questions, researchers explore a topic, collect interesting facts, and prepare a PowerPoint presentation...

The perfect resource for a beginning journalism teacher or someone designing a journalism unit, this activity prompts young scholars to write a newspaper article. It covers all aspects of the writing process, such as a guided warm-up...