American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

This video features a project in which eleventh grade students at High Tech High Media Arts created a book of essays inspired by their work in a community internship. The process of creating high-quality narrative writing—meeting and exceeding standards—is highlighted. Students used models from the professional literary world; each student chose a particular literary influence to guide his or her style. The class worked as team in a collaborative editing process. The film celebrates the connection of school to life, and the power of inspiration, models, critique and collaboration.

Students use the Informational Text Analysis Tool to deconstruct the essential elements of informational text.

Learning Outcomes:
1) Students will be able to analyze informational text of increasing complexity to determine the central idea.
2) Students will be able to find and to cite evidence to support the central idea or claim.
3) Students will be able to ask questions of the text and discuss these questions with their peers.
4) Students will be metacognitive about their gaps in understanding a text's vocabulary and language.
5) Students will be able to determine a text's intended audience and purpose.

This particular roadmap features all of the COLLABORATIVE designed activities for the "Ancient Civilizations Roadmap Unit View (revised)" resource. You could distribute this roadmap to students for work that they complete synchronously with partner(s) as part of their learning path in the unit map.

This particular roadmap features all of the SOLO designed activities for the "Ancient Civilizations Roadmap Unit View (revised)" resource. You could distribute this roadmap to students for work that they complete independently, as part of their learning path in the unit map.

Compare and contrast writing for English Learners using social studies content. Scaffolds include multimedia support, partner work, jigsaw protocol and sentence frames. This roadmap presents the UNIT view (including solo and collaborative tasks). There are two additional roadmaps for distribution that would be helpful when teaching the unit - Ancient Civilizations Roadmap- Solo Activities + Ancient Civilizations Roadmap- Collaborative Activities.

A compendium of protocols used in the lessons and strategies related to checking for understanding, ongoing assessment, and building academic vocabulary, useful as an ongoing reference document alongside the modules.

The ability to ask and answer questions while reading is essential to comprehension. This article discusses instructional strategies used to teach questioning and provides many online resources. The article appears in the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which explores the seven essential principles of the climate sciences for teachers in k-grade 5 classrooms.

Newly revised in 2012! This easy-to-read booklet is perfect for teachers, coaches, and families who want to help students with asthma take part in sports and physical activities. Discusses how to help students control their asthma and follow an asthma action plan. Also explains how to manage asthma triggers, ensure students have access to their asthma medicines, recognize worsening asthma symptoms and take action, and modify activities based on a childs asthma status. Includes sample asthma action plans and information about using a peak flow meter, metered-dose inhaler, and dry powder inhaler.

This companion video to Implementing the 3-5 Additional Language and Literacy (ALL) Block features two fifth grade teachers and their instructional coach at Hollis Innovation Academy in Atlanta, GA. Their commentary and related scenes describe how together as a "learning school" they approach the ALL Block to ensure mastery and agency for all students in their inclusive classroom. The topics covered are: Understanding the Purpose, The Heart of the Practice, Making it My Own, Responsive Teaching, Using Ongoing Assessment, Why This Matters.

Sara Metz, Kindergarten Teacher at Explore Elementary in Thornton, Colorado, gives us a window into her purposeful planning and delivery of a Close Read-Aloud. She takes us through her process of analyzing the curriculum's Close Read-Aloud guide, planning based upon the needs of her students, and responding in the moment. We see Sara analyze student work and plan for future instruction. This video is part of the "Behind the Practice" series and is also a companion to the two-part video series Close Read-Aloud in the Primary Grades, which features Sara and her students in action.

In this "Behind the Practice" video, educators hear Kady Taylor talk about Labs: understanding the purpose of allowing primary students to learn through play and discovery, how Kady "makes it her own" using the teacher's guide and incorporating music, movement, and creative use of materials, the heart of the practice as trust and tools for discovery, responsive teaching by re-grounding students in the purpose of the labs, using ongoing assessment with anecdotal notes, and why this practice allows both teachers and students to "figure things out." Educators should watch this video after watching the Implementing the K-2 Labs video.

This video shows Sarah Mitchell (Instructional Coach), Katie Benton (2nd Grade Teacher) and Brenna Schneider (Kindergarten Teacher), thinking about their work implementing the K-2 Skills Block at Lead Academy.  The coach and teachers describe the importance of the Skills Block, and how to use the phases and micro-phases to most strategically group students and plan differentiated activities. The video addresses common questions and challenges teachers face when implementing this component of the EL Education Language Arts curriculum at grades K-2, in particular how to make most strategic use of the differentiated small group time.

Instructional coaching in EL Education schools increases the achievement and engagement of every student by bringing out the best performance of every teacher. Coaches use both student-centered and teacher-centered methods to help teachers improve the decisions they make about their instruction.

This curriculum builds upon many years of educating students in the garden and scales up content across grades and lessons for instructional scaffolding. It is designed as an interactive teaching tool to be co-taught with classroom teachers and garden instructors as leads. Each lesson connects directly to standards: Next Generation Science, Common Core State, Physical Education, and Environmental and Health Education. The concise and easy to-follow lessons are a packed 45 minutes for preschool through fifth grade. Flexibility is important, so some lessons include several activities that teachers can choose from to accommodate their lesson plans. Consistency is also important, so lessons follow themes and structures found in the Curriculum Map. 360 pages.

Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears is an online professional development magazine which focuses on preparing elementary teachers to teach polar science concepts while also integrating inquiry-based science and literacy instruction. The project draws on research showing that an integrated approach can improve student achievement in science, as well as in reading comprehension and oral and written discourse abilities. Ultimately, the project seeks to bring the polar regions “closer to home” for elementary teachers and their students.

In this unit students will define, identify, and explain 5 types of text structure. Students will explain how text and graphic features enhance a text. They will determine the type of figurative language used in a text. Students will summarize a given text.

A new instructional model, called Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI), is introduced to elementary teachers in this article. The author shows how school librarians and classroom teachers can collaborate to help students construct and communicate evidence, or arguments. Evidence buckets, a collaborative activity, and related online resources are presented. The article appears in the free online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which is structured around the seven essential principles of climate literacy.

In Unit 2, students will build their ability to read and understand informational text and begin to build their knowledge of frogs through closely reading excerpts of the informational text Everything You Need to Know about Frogs and Other Slippery Creatures. Students will use the information gained in reading these excerpts to help them write answers to the questions generated in Unit 1 after reading poems and narratives about frogs. For a mid-unit assessment, students will demonstrate their reading skills through reading a new text about reptiles and amphibians, and they will gather information to answer a research question.
In the second half of the unit, students will continue with the same central text and build their knowledge by studying three "freaky frogs" that have specific adaptations according to where they live: the glass frog, the Amazon horned frog, and the water-holding frog. They will read about these frogs to answer this question in an informative paragraph: How does where a frog lives affect how it looks and/or acts? In the End of Unit 2 Assessment, students read another excerpt of text about the poison dart frog, gather information to answer a research question, and write an on-demand informative paragraph to answer the question.
RI.3.1, RI.3.3, RI.3.4, RI.3.5, RI.3.7, RI.3.8, W.3.2, W.3.7, W.3.8, L.3.1d,e, L.3.4