Practice makes perfect when it comes to learning grammar with this ESL resource. Offering a great way to teach about relative clauses, this lesson engages learners with a series of partner, small group, and whole class speaking and...

Sometimes, the movie version of a book can provide additional details about the source material, particularly when the film is thoughtfully directed and well-acted. Ninth graders watch a two-minute clip from the movie Temple Grandin and...

Plagiarism is the theft of intellectual property. To avoid this crime, class members learn how to create a works cited page and how to craft in-text citations. After examining a high-performance model paragraph and an example of a works...

Explore ways to make research and writing more interesting. The first in a series of three challenge activities designed to accompany Theme 2: Give It All You've Got involve creating sports cards, designing cereal boxes, and using other...

Scholars review the previous nine lessons of analysis of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and use their work to create a formal essay responding to a writing prompt about the purpose of the work. This mid-unit assessment is a quick...

"No flies fly into a closed mouth." Pupils consider the proverb's meaning as they read paragraphs 20–22 from the essay "A Genetics of Justice" by Julia Alvarez. They also engage in small-group discussions about how the author refines her...

How do complex characters develop throughout a text? Pupils read Act 5.1 from Shakespeare's Macbeth, which depicts Lady Macbeth's descent into madness. Using discussion and writing exercises, scholars analyze how Shakespeare develops...

It is all down the drain. Scholars read chapter one of Flush and write any unfamiliar words in their word catchers and identify the narrator and point of view of the story. Pupils complete a point of view anchor chart and use Thought,...

Connect Martin Luther King Jr's famous speech, "I Have a Dream," to The Cay by Theodore Taylor. Taylor refers to the speech in his dedication, which creates a natural segue into talking about the speech and how it relates to the novel....

Take a vacation into French with lots of vocabulary and plenty of activities. This collection of worksheets includes instruction as well as practice and invites French language learners to hone their translation skills.

Use the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin to teach your third grade class about descriptive writing. Following a teacher read-aloud of the story, the class brainstorms a list of adjectives describing the main character. Students use this list...

Teach the class how to survive! Scholars work together to learn the meaning of theme and determine the message  in A Long Walk to Water. After the class discusses possible ideas, they work to identify one central theme for the text....

How is a sentence like the human body? Scholars think about the comparison as they view an image of the human anatomy and begin to complete an Anatomy of a Sentence anchor chart. They review roots, prefixes, and suffixes and then begin...

Use this printing practice worksheet to help pupils learn to form upper and lower case D'Nealian letters from A to Z. There are 26 practice pages on which learners trace letters and words before practicing on their own on the primary...

Focus on the number four as youngsters complete several exercises to solidify this number concept. Note pre-readers will have a hard time with this, as it requires reading instructions. Consider doing together as a class or...

Archetypes help readers connect literature to the world around them. A lesson plan uses elements of pop culture to teach about archetypal traits of common characters  and discuss issues of perception and other literary devices. At...

Show me the evidence. Writers analyze the Command of Evidence row of the rubric for A Long Walk to Water essay. Pupils work in pairs to determine how the writer of a model essay meets the demands of the rubric. They then use a Forming...

Many elements go into an engaging narrative story. Using a helpful resource, scholars analyze a model narrative and deconstruct it using a graphic organizer. Next, they apply their learning from the model to update their plans for their...

Which came first—the painting or the poem? In this case, it is the painting. Scholars closely examine a work of art and then craft an ekphrastic poem in response. A carefully scaffolded nine-page plan leads young poets through the process.

Caps for sale! Get your class into some monkey business with a fun set of activities based on Esphyr Slobodkina's Caps for Sale. Pupils practice tracing lines between caps and monkeys, identify colors of caps,...

What will you do when you grow up? What are you going to do after school is over? Learn about future time clauses and how they connect to independent clauses with a helpful grammar presentation.

Working in groups, learners practice using gerunds as subjects by talking to one another. Then, independently, they write sentences using a subject, a verb, and a subject complement from a given list of each and in their own words. They...

Fire safety is a hot topic for kids! With this resource, little ones will read, color, draw, and play as they are learning about prevention and, as an added bonus, practice naming shapes, counting, and adding numbers! Reading, math, and...