Curated OER
Ballet and Classical Music
Fourth graders explore ballet. In this dance and music humanities lesson, 4th graders practice ballet positions and play a card game using French ballet vocabulary. Students count beats in rhythm patterns and listen to classical music...
Curated OER
Colonial Trades and Apprenticeships
Students examine and analyze culturally significant objects from colonial Boston. They construct a story around the life and work of Nathaniel Hurd from a list of keywords excerpted from a passage about Nathaniel Hurd. In addition, they...
Curated OER
Learn-to-Read Pumpkin Patch
Learners practice identifying and pronouncing the short letter "u" sound. For this phonetic awareness lesson, students access the Starfall.com website and follow the directions on the screen to reinforce the short "u" sound. Learners can...
Curated OER
The Noble Eightfold Path
Students gain an introduction to Buddhist teachings about moral behavior by exploring a depiction of the Buddha and by writing a speech inspired by their interpretation of the Noble Eightfold Path.
Curated OER
Picturing History: John Singleton Copley and British Portraiture
Students observe and compare 18th century British portraits with those made by John Singleton Copley. By conducting research they explore the cultural climate of the portraits in order to write a historically accurate story.
Utah Education Network (UEN)
Greek and Latin Roots- Introduction
Improve vocabulary by reviewing Greek and Latin roots with your ELA class! A fun and easy way for your class to memorize roots, groups are given a set of nine roots and nine definition cards which they must then match. Encourage groups...
Curated OER
Poetic Elements Are Fun!
Engage your class in the elements of poetry with a series of lessons and activities. The plans cover simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and imagery. Learners come up their their own metaphors, identify poetic...
Curated OER
Put the Title of the Lesson Here
Eighth graders write a Compare and Contrast essay comparing the lives of similarly aged students at different Latitudes. They share their essays with epals, via e-mail. They may include digital photographs in their correspondence as well.
Curated OER
Seeing Words in a New Way
What's the best resource to use when looking up words? Use Visual Thesaurus to see a word's meaning. The class accesses the interactive website and then compares and contrasts the difference between using a traditional dictionary and the...
Curated OER
Creating Bloggers
Blogs provide the motivation for this richly detailed writing lesson. After viewing blogs on various websites, class members pick topics, create a blog, and post an entry. Your bloggers then evaluate their work using evaluation sheets....
Curated OER
The Grimm Truth—Comparing & Contrasting Children’s Stories and Fairy Tales in Cross-Cultural Texts at Different Points in Time
Students explore world literature through completing several varied exercises. In this compare and contrast lesson students compare and contrast stories and how time and culture impacts the stories.
The New York Times
Writing to Explain: Creating How-To Scripts and Demonstrations
Excuse me, can you give me directions? Scholars examine and practice technical writing to increase their ability to write directions. They participate in discussion, watch videos, and complete an assignment to create their own directions.
Curated OER
Left-to-Right Reading
Left-to-right, left-to-right, that's the way we read and write! Watch this short video clip and teach your young learners this chant before they start writing!
Penguin Books
Folklore and Fairytales: A Guide to Using Traditional Tales and Reimagined Classics
Every culture has its own stories to tell. An interesting educator's guide shares a large collection of fairytales and folktales, some from different cultures and some re-creations of classics. A summary and brief teaching ideas...
Curated OER
Budget Busters
Use this economic activity to focus on writing summaries of informational text. First, middle schoolers define common economic terms used to describe news about the economy. They closely read news about the federal budget deficit and...
Curated OER
Invent a Holiday
Who wouldn't want to create their own holiday? Use the 12 elements of a holiday to have learners of all ages create their own holiday. These days, it seems like we make any excuse for a holiday! Consider having some fun with your kids...
Curated OER
A Speeding Rocket, a Shooting Star... It's a Racing Reader!
Prepare a gameboard and die-cut race cars to play a fun fluency game. Also create several flash cards to review the long /i/ sound. Then, model reading smoothly and with expression, emphasizing the importance of re-reading texts to...
Curated OER
Setting the Story: Techniques for Creating a Realistic Setting
“It was a dark and stormy night.” Thus begins the 1830's novel Paul Clifford and, of course, all of Snoopy’s novels! Encourage young writers to craft settings for their stories that go beyond Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s often-mocked phrase...
Curated OER
Paraphrasing and Summarizing
Read an article about the migration of our ancestors and write a paragraph. Pupils paraphrase and summarize to restate the information found in a nonfiction text. They write a shortened version of the reading to demonstrate the...
Curated OER
Creative Convincing
Young writers will love examining Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type for examples of good persuasive writing. Generally, when we write persuasive pieces, there are common words we use. Encourage your writers to identify these words and...
Virginia Department of Education
Creating Thesis Sentences
Growing writers explore what it takes to develop and support a thesis statement with pre-fabricated ideas provided by the Virginia Department of Education. Learners take notes on what makes a thesis statement and a topic sentence, and...
Indian Land Tenure Foundation
Gifts from Land and Water
With a series of fun hands-on simulations, young children can learn about conservation and natural resources. Your learners become land detectives, discussing and investigating the gifts that the land and water provide them. They then...
Curated OER
Natural Resources and Ancient Cities
Students explain how the availability of natural resources has affected human settlement patterns. They recognize the interactions of human populations on environments and compare the growth of two ancient cities in relation to natural...
Curated OER
Gasoline Use Around the World
Students contribute their own personal gasoline consumption data with other schools. They share thoughts and opinions on fossil fuels, its effects and what they can do in an effort to conserve natural resources.