Discussion doesn't always need to be spoken. Before you begin The Tempest by William Shakespeare, have kids connect their ideas and experiences to central questions of the play with a silent discussion activity. Once they have...

Readers of Neal Shusterman's young adult science fiction novel, Unwind, engage in a silent discussion, posting their responses to a series of statements about characters in the story.

Invite your class to consider how to respond to a conflict. Designed to be used alongside Secret Saturdays by Torrey Maldonado, a lesson plan focuses on a set of terms: conflict, escalate, deescalate, conflict resolution, denial,...

Project Paperclip, the Redstone Arsenal, and the Huntsville Space Center are all featured in a resource that investigates the contributions of Dr. Werner von Brawn and other German scientists to the US space program....

The post-Civil War convict leasing program, rarely covered in textbooks, is the focus of a lesson that asks class members to use information drawn from primary source documents to assess the program. While the focus is on Alabama's...

Children can do almost anything to music, so get them up and moving, working out and strengthening some major muscle groups. Using exercise bands provides some resistance, which makes the muscles work a little harder. With this lesson...

Add a new dimension to doing the Hokey Pokey by giving each group of four dancers a set of jump bands. There are dance moves for the two dancers holding the jump bands as well as for the dancers doing the Hokey Pokey. The goal is to...

Peas spoilage hot, peas spoilage cold: examine the bacterial growth on newly defrosted peas versus peas that have been defrosted for 24 hours. Using the session one questions in the "Microbes and Food Spoilage" PDF, learners will make...

Get your class outside, away from the television, and maybe even learning something about nature while they're at it. Individuals will chose an open, natural space to spend time in for several days. Each day they will complete a page in...

With this daily counting activity, your kindergartners will master counting in sequence automatically from 0 to 100, and will count in multiples of ten to 100. With the whole class, count to 100. With each number, learners will whisper...

Keep track of assignments, grades, attendance, seating, parent communication, behavior, and more with a one-stop classroom organization center.  

You can never have enough cookies, but do you have enough ingredients? This activity allows your bakers to discover how many batches of cookies they can make with the ingredients provided. Also useable as an independent assignment, your...

What would you do if...? That's a great question, and, when posed to learners with visual impairments, a question that can foster concept development and speaking and problem-solving skills that relate to real-life situations. The...

Learning how to describe an object or a person is a great way to develop verbal and written expression. Learners with special needs improve their verbal expressive skills and concept development skills while playing a guessing game. The...

Build understanding of theme with an activity designed for The Cay and the Common Core. Small groups or pairs use graphic organizers to determine themes, find and record related details from the text, and formulate theme statements. In...

Look back at the third chapter of The Cay with your class. Pupils will conduct a close reading, taking a second look at a chunk of text and responding to a series of text-dependent questions. Wrap up with an analytical writing prompt...

Encourage your learners to examine the setting in Theodore Taylor's The Cay. Pupils work in small groups to put together a description of the setting before reading two more chapters of the book. They use their double-entry journals to...

Make a study of the First Amendment and its relationship to freedom. Pupils rewrite the amendment and discuss the central idea before focusing on a specific phrase. After discussing, class members write a journal entry about the included...

Use Langston Hughes's poem, "Words Like Freedom," to explore the concepts of freedom and liberty. Learners read the poem, determine the theme, and use the provided graphic organizer to examine the connotative and denotative meanings of...

Building upon prior lessons in the series, this reading and writing exercise requires pupils to look back at their own writing, track character development in the novel The Cay, and analyze how Phillip has changed. The reading focus is...

Mrs. Flynt has designed a 12-day moon observation activity that is best assigned when daylight hours are shorter. Middle school moon experts record several factors, including the altitude above the horizon, the azimuth, the phase, and...

Your microbiologists explore a changing algae population and build an exponential function modeling algae concentration from the description given of the relationship between concentrations in cells/ml and days of rapid growth.

Use the Total Physical Response (TPR) strategy to practice Spanish greetings as well as where and who question prompts. Comprised of five days, this short unit is taught completely in Spanish with call-and-response exercises,...