Beacon Learning Center
What Goes Up Must Come Down
After your class has completed The Cay by Theodore Taylor, assess understanding of the plot. First, model how to fill out a plot line for your class. Next, have class members fill in the plot of The Cay on the provided story map. Invite...
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Sketch Book Making: Places for Creative Communication
High schoolers create sketchbooks, explore the uses of journals, write (across the curriculum) from others' points of view, and compare forms of communication from the 1800s to today. A nice blend of individual, whole class, and...
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Finding Your Spot in the World
Students learn the concept of movement by locating their house and the houses of their ancestors.
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Area and Volume
What is the difference between area and volume? Have your charges build models of square centimeters, square inches, square feet, square meters, etc. It's definitely challenging, but there is no better way to learn than by trying...
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Top to Bottom
Marine science classes read about the 2005 North Atlantic Stepping Stones Expedition and review climate change. They use maps to locate the seamount chains. In collaborative groups, they research how climate change may be altering the...
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Worth a Thousand Words: Depression-Era Photographs
Students view images of New Deal programs to see its successes. They work in groups to create captions for the images and suggest captions that might indicate different meanings.
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Wreck Detectives
Junior archaeologists examine types of artifacts from the Bronze Age on the internet. In collaborative groups, they create a story about a ship from this period and then construct a model of the ocean floor after their ship has sunk....
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This Life Stinks
Chemosynthetic communities of cold seep areas are considered in this lesson. Working in collaborative groups, marine biology or oceanography learners research and prepare a report about oxidation-reduction reactions involved with...
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The Sky Show
Learners use the internet to gather information to create their own science lesson plan. They choose from optical, wind, or electrical phenomena and use the internet to research information. Finally, they organize the information they...
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Horatio's Ratios
View a PBS video entitled Horatio's Drive and explore Horatio's Ratios. Collaborative learners form groups to use Mapquest to determine distances covered. They generate the mathematical averages, ratios, and rates in order to calculate...
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Animals on the Farm
Students work in groups to create a description of a farm animal. Other classmates try to guess the animal. The class discusses what farmers need to provide for each animal on their farm (food, shelter, veterinary care). Students...
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Re-Name That Tune
Students select a familiar children's tune and redesign it by rewriting the lyrics, writing a play, a dance, a storybook or a puppet show. Students work in groups and share their finished project with their classmates.
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Germs Experiment 2
Students express artistic ideas thru art glitter and science. Students experiment with the theory of how germs spread. Students summarize findings in an art format. Students work in groups to analyze data.
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A Fairy Tale: Italian Folklore
Students work in groups to write an original fairy tale in Italian. They research the components of a fairy tale, compare and contrast fairy tales with myths and follow an outline to write a complete, 15-20 page fairy tale.
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"who Lives in Your House?"
Fourth graders collect data about the people and animals living in their homes, and the students' shoe sizes. They work in groups to enter the information into a database from which they create graphs. They analyze the data to find the...
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Important Quotes
Pupils investigate the novel "Pride and Prejudice". They identify themes, learn to analyze works of literature, recognize and identify literary techniques for the benefit of attaining skills of criticizing literature.
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Censorship In Fahrenheit 451
Tenth graders explore the concept of censorship through a reading of Fahrenheit 451. They discuss the issue and its relation to contemporary society. Students work in groups to debate the pros and cons of censorship in our society.
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Permit Trading
Emerging environmentalists work in groups and pretend that each is a power company generating electricity for a community. They consider the costs of building a renewable electricity generator that will increasingly replace generating...
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Geometry, Pi, and Ancient Civilizations
By working together, pairs of students will complete a Pi webquest. Using the internet, they examine the ways people in the Ancient Civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia and Greece used Pi. To end the lesson, they review the concepts of...
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Maximize It!
Students design a rectangular box without a lid that has the largest possible volume using the supplied sheet of centimeter graph paper. They work in groups to construct different size boxes to determine the largest possible volume and...
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Beetle Collection and Release
Young scholars investigate plants and compare them to the purple loose strife. As they observe the plants they predict possible impacts on plant populations based on their observations. They work in groups and present their findings to...
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The "Me" Decade: 1970
Learners view the video on Mary Tyler Moore Show. They discuss what they notice about the treatment of Mary Tyler Moore's character in the show. Students listen to a lecture covering notes on web diagram, such as: Fads, fashion, the New...
Teach Engineering
Not So Simple
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...
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Civil War Slang
Students explore the language of the Civil War time period. For this Civil War lesson, students work in groups to research the meanings of Civil War slang.