Read the story "Sunflower House,"  by Eve Bunting with your 2nd graders to investigate the relationships between plants and animals. They will discover how living things change during their lives by creating their own sprout houses....

What a great activity. Kids create humorous ceramic character (heads) spikes to enliven a planter. Modern art is full of expressive and exaggerated forms and your class gets to create them out of clay. This would be a lovely activity to...

Older individuals just overcoming homelessness or drug abuse issues, engage in a practical activity to boost self-awareness. They work through two hours of activities intended to aid them in gaining a self perspective while increasing...

Take writing prompts to another level in this activity, which allows pupils to create scenes of dialogue based on the 1903 silent film, The Great Train Robbery. Useful for a language arts/history cross-curricular activity, the lesson...

“The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?” Prediction, verification, judgment, and extensions of thought are all part of a Directed ReadingThinking Activity (DRTA) developed for Measure for Measure. The rationale, assessments...

Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers” is the focus of a series of activities that model for learners how close reading can lead to understanding. The whole class plays with the metaphor, groups talk about the author’s...

This fun activity guides learners through an exploration of the effects of replacing f(x) with -f(x), f(x) + c, k f(x), and f(x + c). Using graphing calculators, students experiment with variations of the graph of y = x^2 to design a...

Discuss tone and imagery with Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." In an attempt to get his fair lady to consummate their relationship, he write a poem urging her to seize the day! Introduce the author to your high school class,...

Second graders explore floating and sinking and make predictions about whether certain objects are likely to sink or float. They read the story Who Sank the Boat? by Pamela Allen. Pupils loacate rhyming words and discuss the events of...

Students listen as the teacher reads A Country Far Away. They predict what they will do and what they think their partner student will be doing. Students create a KWL chart for Japan. They collect information about their activities on an...

One document contains five different worksheets for practice naming and writing formulas for ionic compounds. The first is particularly notable, as it systematically walks beginning chemists through the process of using the periodic...

This activity provides an interesting way for learners to review vocabulary and practice comprehension skills. There is a six-paragraph passage about the process of fingerprinting and the role it takes on convicting criminals. Eleven...

How diverse is the rainforest? How much more diverse is a rain forest than a temperate forest? Explore these focus questions in a lesson that explores the plants, animals, and insects in forests. After listening to a reading...

A guide to recreating all the phases of the moon out of Oreo cookies with varying amounts of cream filling.  Although a simple activity, there are more involved questions requiring moon cycle and phase comprehension and leading...

You can cover literary elements, writing organization, and proofreading skills in this SMART board activity. Using student paragraphs from a previous assignment, the class reviews the best examples of writing. A SMART board activity...

Can your pupils change the world? Explore this question with Ben Harper's song "With My Own Two Hands" and John Mayer's "Waiting for the World to Change." After listening to the songs, they discuss the tools at their disposal for...

Put your class in the shoes of someone - or something - else with this lesson, which encourages writers to keep a diary from the perspective of a living creature or an abstraction. Use Doreen Cronin's Diary of a Worm and the Six Trait...

Learners participate in a series of demonstrations about Bernoulli's principle. They explain how air pressure varies with air speed. They write a detailed lab report about the activity. This is a great way to explore this concept.

Read Dangerous Minds with your language learning disabled pupils to identify characteristics and connect to literature. This is a specific activity intended for use with the suggested book. The class uses a character map  as a way...

Young elementary-schoolers are constantly reminded to share with others. Use this familiar concept in this equal distribution activity. Scholars choose either 10, 16, or 28 as the number of marbles they have to give out. Then, they...

They always say to write what you know. This approach is used to get middle schoolers prepared to write novels of their own. Using a favorite book as a model, potential novelists respond to prompts that ask about characters, plot, main...

The Apaches: People of the Southwest offers readers a chance to employ the “Ready-Set-Go-Whoa!” strategy (an adaptation of the KWL) to test what they know and summarize what they learn as they read Jennifer Fleischner’s nonfiction...

Let your class voice their opinions with a group debate activity. Before reading John Milton's Paradise Lost, they work in small groups in assigned roles to form a position about authority and rebellion, comparing a...

A lab in which high schoolers examine the difference between arteries and veins. Budding biologists will find out which blood vessel can stretch furthest, recording their data in a table then answering several questions evaluating their...