This lesson will allow students to select and share what details are important on a topic. Groups of students will research a topic and then discuss and determine the top 25 important things someone should know about the topic.

Students must "become" a character in a novel in order to describe themselves and other characters using powerful adjectives.

In this three week unit, students will practice skills related to argumentative writing. They will ultimately write an argumentative/persuasive letter to the school board regarding school safety policy.

Students will discuss the definition of a biography and determine what elements it contains. They will research a famous person and create a web graphic organizer with key achievements and personal information from their life. Peer feedback will be given on the web creation and then an oral presentation will be given.

Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for students to keep track of citations to their articles. When students are using Google Docs to write their papers, they can easily link and cite the articles used for references.

Educators worked with coaches to create Lesson Plans promoting both content area and digital age skills. This Lesson Plan is designed for Grades 6-8 English Language Arts.

Students read literary and informational texts about knowledge and intelligence to understand what happens when humans try to manipulate the minds of others and how our understanding of intelligence has evolved over time. Students express their understanding of these ideas by exploring how authors draw on traditional stories and develop characters and themes to teach us about ourselves and others.

Using their new skills in deconstructing advertisements, students will look at advertisements through the lens of gender.  Students will be encouraged to critically analyze the cultural stereotypes for men and women. Students will deconstruct advertisements based on gender representation.Rationale: Students will begin to see how believing in stereotypes can lead towards a negative self image for men and women.  This is Part 4 of a 5 part Unit: Media Manipulation: What Are They Really Saying?

Using the theme of identity, students will work through various activities to learn the characteristics of a Narrative Essay. This particular unit will/should take place prior to writing the Narrative Essay. Many of the lessons address how to identify, create, apply and analyzeheme, dialogue punctuation, figurative language and citing direct and indirect evidence.

Bio Cube is a useful summarizing tool that helps students identify and list key elements about a person for a biography or autobiography.

For this lesson, students will learn how to pick a topic for a research paper. They will then think of questions they want to answer in their research paper, and use those questions to guide what they take notes on. A detailed PowerPoint explains how to use PowerPoint to organize and take notes.

Plan and outline a free verse poem that explores fear, anger, or forgiveness.

The framers of the Constitution designed three branches of government. The role of the legislative branch was to make the laws, the role of the executive branch was to enforce the laws and the judicial branch was to interpret the laws. The constitution is set up in seven sections or articles and also has an introduction called the preamble.

You, your classmates, and your community are diverse whether you realize it or not. You probably come from different heritages, have differing religious beliefs, and have different family backgrounds. This is no different than both the American Indians already living in America, as well as the first colonists who came here. How did so many nationalities, cultural backgrounds, ethnic origins, and religious beliefs all end up in one country? This unit will guide you to understand how European, American Indian, Asian, and African people all came to live together in the Western Hemisphere.

George Washington served the country for many years before becoming President. He was a general during the American Revolution and served as president of the Constitutional Convention, where the Constitution was written. After all that, he was ready to retire. The electoral college had different plans for George Washington though. All 69 electors chose him to be the first President of the United States of America. George Washington was the only President to receive all of the electoral college’s votes. Americans supported the choice for President and celebrated Washington as he traveled from his home in Mount Vernon to New York City, then onto the nation’s capital. On April 30, 1789 George Washington, at age 57, took the first oath of office as President of the United States under the Constitution. John Adams was his vice president.

President Jefferson’s style was very different from that of Adams and Washington; because of that, many Americans looked forward to his inauguration. As people from across the nation gathered in the new capital to listen to Jefferson’s inaugural address, many wondered if the less formal president did in fact, want to limit the powers of government. They didn’t have to wait long.

The nation continued to grow in size and wealth, each region experiencing its own different kind of economic growth which caused them to develop differently. Citizens differed across regions in their ideas of political, economic, and social progress. For the success of the growing nation, Americans throughout the country tried to compromise on their disagreements. Unfortunately, no amount of compromise could minimize the harsh growing pains the nation was about to experience.

During the last part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth centuries, there was a growing interest in social reform, or an organized movement to improve the quality of life for particular groups of people. The motivations behind these movements were both political and religious.

Just like the industrialization that took place in the North, the geographical features of the region played just as important a role in the agrarian way of life in the South. Because geography was responsible for almost every aspect of life in the South (as it was in the North as well), its significance cannot be understated.