Curated OER
Early Explorers Project
Students choose an explorer from a given list, create an original song or poem based on the life of their explorer, make puppets to represent their explorer and then present their original piece to the class while students take notes on...
Curated OER
Project Assessing the Need
Learners determine ways to serve the community. In this service learning lesson, students list human wants and human needs and repeat the activity for community wants and community needs. Learners contact local agencies to conduct a...
Curated OER
Photography for Language Use and Awareness
Students make storyboards and take photographs for slides to illustrate stories or "how to" demonstrations and write and recorded scripts to accompany their slides.
Curated OER
Balanced Literacy Project
Fourth graders review all the materials they've studied about the rain forest and begin to organize their research paper by choosing a topic. They begin by rereading the introductory book, "The Great Kapok Tree," by Lynne Cherry as well...
Curated OER
Read All About it
Learners create and publish a newspaper that reflects and explains pioneer and medieval societies. They become newspaper writers for a specific time period. They adopt a holistic approach to exploring community life in medieval and...
Curated OER
African Folktales
Students study the elements of folktales. They write, perform and produce their own African folktales using camcorders and movie software.
American Bar Association
News Literacy Model Curriculum in Social Studies
Scholars investigate news literacy in the twenty-first century. They use technology, legal decisions, writings, and digital privacy to analyze the topic. Using what they learned, a group assignment looks into both the challenges and...
Curated OER
Elementary Keyboarding Activities
Listen to the sound of children's fingers flying across their keyboards as they perform these fun typing lessons. From creating alphabet books and multimedia presentations to researching presidents and writing class...
National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition
Building Vocabulary: Prefixes, Roots, and Suffixes
Word roots, prefixes, and suffixes can hold the key to determining the meaning of a host of different words. Included here are five pages of prefixes, roots, and suffixes paired with their meanings and example words.
Curated OER
Lesson Mystery: The Game is Afoot
Learners enter and experience the world of Sherlock Holmes and hard-boiled detectives in this unit on mysteries. They review and analyze the ""Whodunit Requirements" and the "Mystery Contract" that accompany this lesson. Each student...
Curated OER
Library Orientation
Quidditch anyone? Here's a fun way to introduce your class to the resources available in the library as well as on the Internet. Researchers create an outline of the sources they locate about Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, quidditch, and...
Curated OER
Ready . . . Set . . . Read! Teaching Reading Fluency
There are many activities and lesson ideas that teachers can use to reinforce reading fluency skills. This article brings a variety of strategies to light, including how to incorporate fluency instruction within novel units and...
National Constitution Center
Creating Your Own Town Hall Poster
Middle and high schoolers are walking into a world rife with strong political viewpoints and vocal opinions. Help to prepare them for controversial discussions with a instructional activity in which they choose, research, and learn more...
Curated OER
Through Our Eyes
After reading Sandra Cisneros’ novel The House on Mango Street, class members design a canned food drive, create advertisements for the drive, and use digital cameras to document the entire process. In addition, pupils journal their...
Curated OER
"O Captain! My Captain!"
Who was Walt Whitman, and what link does he have to president Abraham Lincoln? After Lincoln's assassination, Whitman wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" This poem and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" are the focus of...
Curated OER
It's Magic: Understanding the Roles, Responsibilities, and Requirements of Workers
Fifth graders investigate the world of work in relation to knowledge of self and to make informed career decisions. Then they break into groups to complete the training and education for two careers selected from a listing in the...
Curated OER
Respect: Looks Like, Sounds Like, Feels Like
Sixth graders participate in a question and answer discussion on respect and then complete the "Planning to Use Respect" activity sheet. They describe the senses of a stuffed animal to their peers and assess how respect looks, sounds and...
Curated OER
How Does a Friend Act?
Students brainstorm a list of characteristics that friends should and should not have. In groups, they are given a set of hand puppets in which they role-play different scenerios in front of the class. To end the instructional activity,...
Curated OER
The Times and Life During the California Gold Rush
Fourth graders read about the era in their history books, write in their journals revolving around the Gold Rush, making crafts such as newspapers, and also play the part of the Forty-niners.
Curated OER
Short Story Commercials
Middle schoolers read short story selections, and work with classmates to produce commercials using digital video equipment.
Curated OER
Social Studies Wonders: An Exploration
Help middle schoolers conduct Internet research and develop a working definition for the discipline of social studies. From a list of websites, they develop classification skills and differentiate between primary and secondary sources....
Curated OER
Read to Us!
Kids love being read to. Use these children's books and accompanying activities to engage young learners. Fun drawing print-outs and charts are included, and a variety of reading strategies are employed.
Curated OER
Acting Like a Third Grader (Part 1)
Third graders, after brainstorming the positive and negative types of behaviors, become aware of the right and wrong way to behave as a third grader. They perform a skit that demonstrates the skills and behaviors used by third grade...
Discover Earth
Weather Stations
Transform your classroom into a fully functioning weather station with this series of hands-on investigations. Covering the topics of temperature, precipitation, wind patterns, and cloud formation, these activities engage young...