Active listening is all about thinking, asking questions, and making connections. That's the take-away from a activity about active listening. Participants learn techniques for identifying important information, including how to ask...

What happens at the end of a plant's life cycle? Show kids the natural way that plants show that they're decomposing, as well as the importance of compost, with a lesson about living organisms. After reading Log Cabin by Anne Schreiber,...

Examine the different perspectives on the future of United States Navy bombing exercises taking place on Vieques, Puerto Rico with this lesson from The New York Times. Here, young learners read "Islanders to Vote on Vieques Bomb Drills,"...

Four fabulous activities immerse amateur astronomers into measuring objects that we cannot handle. The experiences are applied to NASA's Space Interferometry Mission, which will take measurements of planets around stars other than our...

If driving to school only takes 10 minutes, then how long does it take to drive to a tropical rainforest in Colombia? Explore the focus question in a activity that uses measurement tools and formulas to figure out the time and...

Young scholars demonstrate how to solve word problems. They will watch the video "Math Can Take You Places" and identify three problem solving strategies.

Students use an Internet tool, The Take-Away Bar" to solve subtraction problems. They use mental strategies to subtract a two-digit number from a larger two-digit number. Students write and solve subtraction problems. They describe...

Go another round on rounding. Pupils refine their learned rounding skills in the eighth installment in an 18-part unit on decimals. The lesson plan takes away some of the previous scaffolding to encourage scholars to use the procedures...

Commercial advertising—we can't get away from it, but do we realize just how often we are being advertised to? With this lesson, scholars analyze mass media to identify how its techniques influence our daily lives. Learners browse...

Class members predict and count how many items need to be cleaned up in class while skip counting by 10s. They estimate whether having each child clean up 10 items will be enough to get the room ready for the next day. Everyone counts...

For this math worksheet, students learn a mental math strategy in addition called compensation. When adding a number such as 29, students learn to add 30, then take 1 away. Students solve 25 problems in which they round to the nearest...

This mini-instructional activity about informal letter writing is packed with a lot of information about writing a friendly letter. Class members begin by working in pairs to answer questions after reviewing letter models. Then, take...

The evaporation of water and what happens to it as it travels through the water cycle are the focuses of this lesson. The evaporation of water seems like a "magical" process to people of all ages. This lesson takes away the mystery, and...

Caring, trustworthiness, and responsibility—these are only a few character traits in focus of a lesson based on stories from the Civil War era. Class members explore several influential lives while reading biographies that highlight...

What impact do humans have on greenhouse gas emissions? What are the natural causes of these gasses? Thanks to the carbon cycle, carbon dioxide eats away at the earth's atmosphere with the intensified help of humans. Young scientists...

Readers take the main characters in Matilda and individually describe them through a mnemonic. To get there, group members create an acrostic poem describing the character they were given, and choose one of the words from the...

As part of their study of the 1963 March on Washington, class members do a side-by-side comparison of the original text of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech" with a transcript of the speech he delivered. The take away from the...

Pupils use Gallop Poll results to explore causes and effects of the concerns of Americans in the past. They administer a similar poll and consider what Americans in their community view as the most pressing problems in the United States...

With all the stuff available online, good essays are just a click away. But talk about tracking! Writers beware! New tech can now identify plagiarism, and the consequences of presenting someone else's work as your own are severe. Here's...

There are many ways to approach finding the rational approximation of an unknown square root. Here is a problem that will help math learners make a connection between square roots and their order on a number line. As usual, determine two...

Always check your assumptions when interpreting data and data visualizations. That's the take away from this exercise. Class members examine a failed project that looks at search trends to predict flu outbreaks and consider the...

Equality does not equal equity. That's the take-away from a lesson that asks young people to consider what could be done to make a variety of situations more just, more equitable. After examining images that illustrate the difference...

It's not just what you say but how you say it! That's the take-away from a lesson plan about verbal and non-verbal communication. An engaging activity has middle schoolers demonstrating how tone of voice and body language can...

Be positive! That's the take-away from a lesson about how a positive attitude influences actions and increases one's ability to succeed. To conclude the lesson, participants create a plan for how to respond positively to obstacles.