Different currencies, multiple armies, unreliable protection from thieves: class members experience these challenges playing a game that demonstrates life under the Articles of Confederation. After playing the game—which takes them on a...

Scholars play high-frequency word baseball, pretending to be a pitcher and a batter. Players take turns choosing baseballs with high-frequency words printed on them. If they read the word correctly, they move to the next base until they...

Two lessons focus on making a beat. Using popular African American music of its time, scholars listen and analyze the rhythm then recreate it with hands drums, and cups. 

Young scholars build a strong understanding of medial sounds, vowels, and letter sound correspondence while playing Bingo. Taking turns, peers choose a card and say its name and medial sound; all players look for the vowel on their card....

Take a pretend trip to the movies with a series of basic code sentences. Images of movie tickets, popcorn buckets, and movie cameras award learners varying amounts of points for each sentence that they can successfully read.

Words are interesting things—you can change them by adding or subtracting phonemes. Here, emergent readers change the pictures on their phoneme pie by removing or adding various final phonemes. A fun way to build phonetic competency!

After teaching vowel digraphs, reinforce the concept with an activity! Young scholars fish from a pile of 60 cards to match words with the same sound. Featured vowel digraphs include ea, au, aw, ow, oa, ai, ay, and ee.

Introduce learners to the magical Japanese hermit named Sennin with a reading response activity. As fifth graders finish the story of Sennin and his mystical powers, they answer four short-answer questions.

Build your library of strategies and activities for teaching phonemic awareness with the ideas provided in this resource. Described here are five different activities to try out with your class.

"i before e. . ."  Spelling is easier if kids know the eight basic spelling rules  contained in this resource packet.

Use this worksheet to research a future or past olympian. There's a space for researchers to brainstorm things they'd like to know, a space for them to record notes, and a KWL chart. There's also an open space to write a cumulative...

Make your class aware of the difference between media violence and real violence. Using prior knowledge, a video clip, and a worksheet, class members explore and discuss the unrealistic portrayal of violence in the media. Learners...

Here is an interesting take on the old timed-fluency activity. In pairs, learners work together to see how fast they can read two sets of high-frequency words. Peer one reads a word from his list; peer two works fast to find that word in...

Extend your lesson on Christopher Myers' H.O.R.S.E with a series of activities about basketball. After kids read the book, they match basketball terms with their definitions, find as many words as they can with the letters H, O, R,...

Here's a packet filled with suggestions and activities for teaching the alphabet.

Let's go to the zoo! Take a pretend trip to the zoo with a lesson plan about animals that live at the zoo. Kids sing, match animals, practice animal sounds, and read about Sammy the Snake's birthday party.

Inferencing is a necessary reading skill to uncover non-explicit messages in text. Use the set of resources as a way to guide learners toward becoming expert inferrers through reading prompts and literature with text and without text.

Scholars work with root and meaning cards to build vocabulary skills. Playing with a partner, learners read a root, locate its meaning, and cover it with a counter. The first player to cover their board wins.

Can you find the mittens? What about the reindeer—or Santa? Try an online Christmas-themed word search to add some festive language arts fun to the classroom this year.

Poetry is all about sound and rhythm. The sound of the words, the rhythm of the lines, and the emotional atmosphere created by these elements and the literary devices poets use, compress whole stories into a few stanzas. The specialized...

N.B.. cit., n.b., viz., sc., inf. e,g,—these abbreviations frequently appear in academic papers and on works cited lists, but what do they mean? Part of a larger series to improve writing skills, the handout on Latin terms and...

Sometimes the best way to understand a concept is to break it down. Young vocabulary pupils work with word parts in a hands-on activity that prompts them to connect flash cards with affixes to their root and base words....

The tart dart left a hard scar on the large shark. Here's an exercise designed to help readers develop the phonemic awareness skills needed to detect the vowel sounds in words. The exercise, the third in the series of 16 and...

A reading of What's The Big Idea, Ben Franklin? provides an opportunity for class members to practice paraphrasing, quoting, and citing sources. An exercise on how to avoid plagiarizing is also included.