Curated OER
Sonnet Illumination
Pupils create presentations of digital sonnet illuminations along with sonnet research. In this Sonnet lesson, students view images, colors, and listen to sounds of their own choice to illuminate Shakespeare...
Curated OER
Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Memoirs
Students watch the video "Pierre Elliot Trudeau: Memoirs," complete a vocabulary list, and participate in a discussion of the video. They explore one of Cananda's most charismatic leaders.
Curated OER
Holiday Cards using Publisher
Students create a holiday card using technology. In this technology lesson, students use Publisher templates to create a holiday card. Students organize, design, and edit their card.
Curated OER
Stakeholders Lesson
Students discover stakeholders in life situations. In this personal responsibility lesson, students ask and answer questions about real life scenarios, discussing who is at stake if things aren't handled correctly.
Curated OER
Novel Analysis
Students read the novel, Lord of the Flies, then write an essay analyzing the novel. They analyze, in small groups, characters, plot, setting, style, symbolism, theme, critical responses, and historical influences
Curated OER
Parts of a Story
Students read a short fiction book and demostrate comprehension by identifying the main characters, setting, conflict, theme, and summarizing the main points. They organize the information in Inspiration and create a powerpoint to show...
Curated OER
What Is the Influence?
Students investigate propaganda techniques. In this media awareness instructional activity, students watch instructor-selected commercial clips and use the provided propaganda handouts to identify the propaganda techniques used in each...
Curated OER
Media in Research Multimedia Final Project
Students work cooperatively in groups to research a topic of their choice. They create a multimedia presentation of the information researched. Throughout the project they generate their own progress journals.
Virginia Department of Education
Writing Counterarguments
This activity is better utilized as a peer-editing exercise and not as an activity on how to write counterarguments. Writers take their argumentative rough drafts, peer edit in groups of four, and review the author on common essay...
Curated OER
Prisms-Turn Up The Volume
Identify the length, width, and height of prisms. Critical thinkers calculate the volume of prisms given small amounts of information. They derive the formula given the length, width and height.
Curated OER
Clifford's Big Idea: Be Responsible
Students become aware of how important it is to be responsible at home and school through meaningful reading and language experiences. In this Clifford Gets a Job lesson plan, students author their own booklet regarding responsibility at...
Curated OER
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Essay Questions
In this literature activity, students respond to 31 short answer and essay questions about Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Students may also link to an online interactive quiz on the novel at the bottom of...
Dream of a Nation
Big6 Research Project
Do research projects at your school look like a class of eighth graders staring at a blank screen? Use the Big 6 research method to guide middle schoolers through the process of finding a topic, searching for and evaluating sources,...
Curated OER
Novel Character Study
Students complete a character study using a database to compile information from a novel. They design a five slide presentation highlighting the character's reaction to different situations in the book. They write an acrostic poem using...
Curated OER
Recognizing Propaganda/Bias
Middle and high schoolers examine the uses of propaganda during the Nazi era. Using examples of propaganda used by Hitler, they discuss how it changed the thinking and ideas of people exposed to it. In groups, they identify how and why...
Pulitzer Center
Peacebuilding: Taking Home Lessons Learned in Africa
Learners take a closer look at one journalist's work on UN Peacebuilding efforts in four African nations: Sierra Leone, Burundi, Central African Republic, and Guinea Bissau. They collaborate to define peacebuilding and discuss...
Curated OER
Gender Roles: Exposing Stereotypes
A series of activities help middle- and high-schoolers identify and explore gender stereotypes and how they can lead to violence and abuse. Use think-pair-share to activate whole class brainstorming about what it means to "be a man" and...
Newspaper Association of America
By the Numbers: Mathematical Connections in Newspapers for Middle-Grade Students
A cross-curricular resource teaches and reinforces mathematical concepts with several activities that use parts of a newspaper. Scholars use scavenger hunts to find the different ways math is used in the paper along with using data...
Curated OER
What's in the Time Capsule? A Technology-Connected Lesson Plan
Twelfth graders use computers and the Internet to research a specified area, word processors to prepare an essay, a digital camera, a video camera gather visuals, and a scanner to add visuals to a PowerPoint presentation as they discover...
Curated OER
Lesson Plan: A Guided Tour
Albert Bierstadt's painting Wind River Country shows viewers how a reader progresses through a story. Your class studies the light and dark areas, how the eye moves across the painting, and what attracts the audience to the work, and...
Curated OER
My Own Backyard
Students explore and react to the painting The Road to Santa Fe. In this interacting with art instructional activity, students locate various objects in the painting. Students copy the angle of objects by using their bodies. ...
Denver Art Museum
Tea Gathering Quick-Write
Japanese tea gatherings are the inspiration for a great lesson. Learners are provided with an image of a tea caddy made for thick tea and asked to describe what they notice and what that might mean. This leads into a larger lesson about...
Denver Art Museum
Descriptive Haiku
Even though this is technically an art lesson, haiku poetry is actually the main focus! Learners view photographs of Japanese tea caddies. They list five descriptive words for the caddies, then write haiku poems using the caddies as...
Conneticut Department of Education
Instructional Strategies That Facilitate Learning Across Content Areas
Imagine 28 instructional strategies, appropriate for all subject areas and all grade levels. Directed Reading-Thinking Activities (DRTA), Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) activities, KWL charts, comparison matrixes, classification...