Smithsonian Institution
We Have a Story to Tell: Native Peoples of the Chesapeake Region
How did colonial settlement and the establishment of the United States affect Native Americans in the Chesapeake region? Your young historians will analyze contemporary and historical maps, read informational texts, and work in groups to...
Johnson County Community College
Treasured Stories by Eric Carle
Explore the works of Eric Carle with a set of four lessons focused around the stories, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, Papa, Please Get the Moon For Me, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Young readers develop a storyboard,...
Curated OER
Write Me a Story
Second graders use the writing process and submit a story to www.kids.com. In this story writing lesson, 2nd graders choose a topic for a story contest. Students develop their stories. Students complete a her prewriting organizer....
Curated OER
What is a Philanthropist?
What does a philanthropist do? Help your class explore philanthropy using character development and literacy ideas. Learners will define and give examples of philanthropy, listen to The Lion and the Mouse, discuss how the characters help...
Curated OER
Dolch Sight Words in a Story
Learners read a story with 220 basic sight words. They discuss why the words are important to identify and utilize them in their own writing assignments.
Curated OER
Call to Arms: A Service Project
Sick of selling candy and washing cars? How about hosting a Digital Day or a Learning Lunch? The suggestions here make fund raising fun and rewarding. Raise money to preserve important maps and other primary source documents.
Curated OER
Tear Into a Story
Learners retell a story using the correct sequence of events for a story they have listened to five times. They identify the characters and the setting for the story, and sequence the events using a dissembled copy of the book.
Curated OER
Introduce Vocabulary: How Do Dinosaurs Go To School? (Yolen)
Dinosaurs don't go to school...but what if they did? Use Jane Yolen's book How Do Dinosaurs Go To School to explore vocabulary in context. Find this on YouTube if you don't have the text on hand. These in-text words give some ideas of...
Curated OER
Movie Riddles: An ESL Activity to Get Student Talking About Movies
Enjoy the thrill of the movies with this ESL activity! Not only can learners talk about their favorite films, but in creating riddles about their chosen movies, they can practice the skills of context clues and deductive reasoning. This...
Stanford University
Lesson Plan: Montgomery Bus Boycott
Most of us have heard of Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Martin Luther King, Jr. But what about Claudette Colvin, Virginia Durr, Freedom Summer, or the Birmingham Children's Crusade? A five-lesson unit prompts class members...
Curated OER
Dear Miss Florence: Writing Letters To the Boardinghouse for Artists
Imagine being one of the painters in 1910 at the Lyme Art Colony in Connecticut. Using the Florence Griswold Museum's on-line resources to gather information about the daily life of artists at the boardinghouse, learners write a letter...
Curated OER
Story Starters
Sixth graders examine the pictures on a chart and relate to their own experiences. In this story starters writing lesson plan, 6th graders explore the pictures presented by the teacher and then create an original story based on the...
Curated OER
Show And Tell
Have you ever saved your money to buy something you really wanted? Elementary schoolers share how they saved their money for things they wanted, and they bring in one or two items that they bought with their personal savings.
Curated OER
Memories of Friends
Here is a gentle and important lesson on death which is designed for young children. The teacher tells his/her pupils a story about a pet who died. A discussion ensues about feelings we all have when an animal or a person who we love...
PBS
Analyzing Stop and Frisk Through Personal Stories and Infographics
How much can you learn about an important topic from a single image? High schoolers analyze an infographic that represents the number of stops performed during the Stop and Frisk police procedure. After building background information...
Curated OER
Adoption Stories
Although originally designed for young film makers who wanted to enter their videos in a contest, the step-by-step instructions included here would serve as a guide for any video project. Classes with no access to video editing software...
Curated OER
We Are All Authors: Create a Book
Every child is an author with this engaging reading activity. First the class reviews the various parts of a book such as the title, author, dedication, and author-biography. Then each individual will choose a story of their own to...
Curated OER
My Senses Tell Me...
Students explore how to use their sense to draw conclusions. In this human biology lesson, students use their senses to observe various objects in learning centers. The centers include tasting salt, touching sandpaper, hearing bells and...
American Chemical Society
Density: Sink and Float for Liquids
We don't think of liquids as floating typically, but a quick look at any oil spill tells a different story. Lesson explores various densities of liquids and why this fact is important. After observing the density variation, scholars...
Curated OER
It's All About Expression: Growing Independence and Fluency
In an engaging anticipatory set, the teacher uses several different strategies to activate prior knowledge about reading with expression, including using sentence strips (that must be prepped ahead of time) to show different moods. The...
Curated OER
How To Make an Apple Pie and See the World
Young scholars have a class discussion on how the variety of foods we use on a daily basis come from all over the world. They identify foods that they are familiar with that come from other places.
Curated OER
Let's Get it Together! Reading to Learn
Let’s learn about frogs! Young readers are led through “Freaky Frogs,” a non-fiction article. Teach learners how to edit an article so there are fewer details to sift through. After talking through the article, they learn the six steps...
Curated OER
Understanding Short Stories and Their Elements
Students identify short story elements. In this story elements lesson, students review vocabulary about the elements of a story and then practice finding the elements in the short story links.
Curated OER
My Senses Tell Me...
Students work at "Sense Stations" to explore each of the five senses.