Students use Twitter to complete a literature analysis. In this literature and technology lesson, students read chapters from a piece of literature and write summaries. Students use Twitter to communicate about the literature.

In this episodic summary graphic organizer learning exercise, students practice their problem solving skills as they chart an event by identifying the problem, sequence of events, setting, and major players.

There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes of a local news program. Read this passage independently or as a whole class to learn about all the different people that work hard to bring us the news. Afterward, young learners determine...

Compound machines, nothing more than a combination of simple machines working together, are the focus of an activity that asks class members to use the provided information to take a look at the way innovators combine simple machines to...

A Rube Goldberg machine does not really look like it would make work easier. Introduce your class to Rube Goldberg with a resource that shows how his inventions make simple tasks harder to complete. 

Weather — there's more to it than meets the eye of the storm. With this resource young meteorologists learn about the basics of weather, including information about the factors that influence the weather, common weather vocabulary,...

Show your class how engineers use graphs to understand large and complex systems. The resource provides the beginnings of graph theory by introducing the class to set theory, graphs, and degree distributions of a graph. 

Introduce "The Inn of Lost Time" by Lensey Namioka to your middle schoolers with a reader's resource page. It includes links to different activities, including a creative writing prompt about losing fifty years of your life, and a...

Students explore the concept data sets.  In this data sets lesson, students find the 5 number summaries for salaries of teachers and compare them with 5 number summaries of professional baseball players.  Students use box and...

Six tasks make up a lesson plan designed to reinforce comprehension and language skills using the poem "The Pied Piper" by Robert Browing. Scholars discuss and define unknown words, identify adjectives and onomatopoeia, review...

Introduce your class to the steps that occur in the manufacturing of parts, the assembly, and the testing of a Mars rover. Pupils learn about fabrication techniques and tolerances in the manufacturing process. 

Introduce your class to air masses and how they affect the weather with a lesson that focuses on the differences between high and low air pressure systems. The class explores actual weather data using archived weather data.

There are patterns in nearly everything — even earthquakes. Pairs research current earthquakes to see if there are any patterns. They determine the mean, median, and mode of the earthquake data, along with the maximum and...

Help your class determine the types of pollutants coming from vehicle exhaust. Groups use an air quality monitor to determine the emissions from different vehicles, to gain knowledge about combustion energy, and to predict how the...

The Lotus Effect ... is it not some kind of yoga pose. In the last installment of a nine-part series, young scientists observe the Lotus Effect on lotus leaves and water-repellent cloths. They observe how motion and damage affect the...

Bone up on bone density. The second installment of the seven-part series has pupils read articles on two different websites to learn about bone density and its measurement, as well as X-rays and other imaging tools. A quiz assesses their...

Don't assume your pupils understand assumptions. A teacher resource provides valuable information on inferences, assumptions, and conditions, and how scholars tend to overlook these aspects. It focuses on regression analysis, statistical...

This annotated bibliography and list of websites are valuable resources for any study of the Holocaust and/or of Elie Wiesel's Night.

What is the "Faurisson Affair”? What is “Holocaust Revisionism”? What does freedom of speech entail? Do revisionists have a right to voice their ideas? Such questions are at the heart of a richly detailed, thought provoking lesson...

The secret to a successful literature circle discussion is preparation. Readers prepare for such a discussion by completing a two-page worksheet that asks them to summarize the text, record new words, ask and answer questions, and...

Eliminate the hard work of creating an entire literature unit with this reading guide for the novel Sarah, Plain and Tall. From background information about the author and her motivation for writing the story to...

It's a gas. Middle schoolers build a biogas generator following the directions in this resource. After a few days of observation, they demonstrate that the gas given off by the decomposing manure is flammable. The activity concludes as...

Fourth graders explore the main characters in the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. In this Hatfield-McCoy lesson, 4th graders gather information about the feud from the Internet and books. Students research the main characters involved and write a...

Young scholars participate in a simulation of the equal and unequal distribution of the earth's renewable resources. They discuss renewable resources and how food resources can increase and decrease, participate in the simulation, and...