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Are You My Mother Game
Invite your kindergarteners to explore sound and hearing. Using film canisters, or containers, filled with items from the story "Are You My Mother?" they will predict what the objects were from the story. Tip: you could create a...
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Reading Bugs
Review the phonemic sounds of the alphabet letters before examining how to blend letter sounds to make a word. During this teacher-modeled lesson, learners make word bugs out of three phonemes that blend together. As an assessment, read...
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Fighting The Horse Race: Creating Ads Which Explore 2008 Presidential Candidates & Issues
What is advertising? What role does it plan in an election? Middle and high schoolers discuss advertising and its purpose by sifting through different magazines and discussing the products they find. Then they relate advertisements to...
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Nym Family
List and identify words for each part of the "Nym" family: synonyms, antonyms and homonyms. Middle schoolers place words in the correct category, then find the corresponding mate in a dictionary or thesaurus.
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Troublesome Word Pairs
This activity helps to understand when to use commonly confused words. It includes definitions, writing exercises, and questions that require paraphrasing the meaning of sentences. A good exercise for middle schoolers, or review for high...
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Descriptive Prompt: Precise Language
Incorporate sensory details into a piece of descriptive writing. First, elementary and middle schoolers improve a piece of writing by using precise, vivid language, as well as appropriate word choice. They then listen to a variety of...
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"I am a pirate with a wooden leg": Stomping Iambic Pentameter
What is blank verse? Iambic pentameter? Meter? Use the attached document to review these ideas with your middle schoolers. This plan has learners get up and stomp to iambic pentameter, which is a fun change from just clapping the...
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Chart Making for Navigators
Learners discuss the importance and function of nautical maps for sailors. They, in groups, take soundings of a simulated bay in a shoebox and develop a nautical chart that enable them to navigate the shoebox safely.
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Web Designs: A Story Comes Alive
Students work cooperatively to choose a theme, write a story, and produce a web site to display this story in this middle-level lesson on the career of a web designer. This excellent lesson ends with an organized, web site launch party.
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Mountain Biking - Riding Uphill
Mountain biking sounds like a lot of fun, but it also sounds like a lot of hard work! You have to get uphill to enjoy the ride downhill. Learn about shifting gears to go uphill and to keep your weight balanced properly. This is one...
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Creating a Memorial Day Poster Poem
Does your class know about the meaning of Memorial Day? Discuss the history of the holiday in this lesson, which prompts elementary and middle schoolers to create word webs of ideas about the holiday. Additionally, they create poems...
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Graphing Ordered Pairs On A Coordinate Plane
Sinking ships, construction paper, coordinate planes, sounds like fun day in math class. Play the game Battleship with your class and reinforce the concept of graphing ordered pairs.
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A Lesson in Biodiversity: Making Comparisons Between Defensive Mechanisms Utilized by Marine Organisms
If your upper elementary or middle school marine biology learners are going to visit an aquarium, then here is a field trip activity guide for you. It is written specifically for The Maritime Aquarium, but the idea can be adapted to...
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Words That Sell
Explore words, definitions, their connotations and associations with brand names. Middle and high schoolers identify words used in commercials and determine their effect upon the consumer population. They explore how meanings are...
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Introducing Grammar: Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation
Focusing on correct grammar usasge as well as the concept of language evolution, this conventions lesson prompts middle and high schoolers to examine the structure of sentences and word classes (parts of speech). Use the three activites...
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Focus on Figurative Language
Using the poems "First Snow" by Ted Kooser and "Eating Alone" by Yi-Young Lee (or other suggested poems by Robert Frost or Sara Teasdale), middle schoolers search for examples of figurative language. Guide your learners by discussing...
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A Creative Presentation
Bring writing to life with this lesson in which elementary and middle schoolers create a display of the imagery they identify in a series of Gary Paulsen books. They read the suggested materials, identify imagery and descriptive...
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Glaciers Worksheet #2
A map of the Hudson River Valley is exhibited here. Arrows representing glacial striations are spread across the map for learners to analyze. They answer five multiple choice questions in response. The worksheet is a compact review of...
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Wave Speed
In this waves worksheet, learners use the equation for wave speed to calculate frequency or wavelength. This worksheet has 5 problems to solve.
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Word Building
In this long vowel worksheet, 1st graders will focus on the long o sound. Students will study 6 pictures and choose the beginning, middle, and end sound for each before writing the words on the lines provided.
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Dazzling D's and Buzzing B's
Students differentiate between the letters D and B. They trace and write the letters D and B, then spell different words containing D and B using letter manipulatives. Students then listen to the Dr. Seuss "ABC Book" and identify the...
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Build A Word With "o" as the Short Mid Vowel
In this short "o" build a word worksheet, 1st graders look at 6 black line pictures before finding the letters that spell the name of each. They say the name, choose the letters including the middle "o", and write the name of the item on...
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E-e-e-e-eggs in Be-e-ed???????
Students practice techniques and strategies to form a solid foundation of phonemic awareness with the vowel sound of e=/e/. They explore the correspondence between the written letters and their phonemes through the book, "A New Bed," by...
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Sally's Camel Has Two Humps!
First graders observe what the letter "m" looks like as it is written. They pretend to make the sound they make after eating a bowl of their favorite ice cream saying, "mmmmm" and do a cheer for the letter "m". They then look at a...