HyperSlides are digital lessons/units that help students learn the material in a way that is engaging and inquiry-based. Students will work together to complete a HyperSlides unit centering around animal adaptations for standards in grades 3-5. Students will work creatively and collaboratively with a variety of Course of Study standards that engage students through using Google Slides and Hyperlinks to assist in the understanding of animal adaptations. This project will take several class periods to complete. After an introduction to the Hyperslides, students are encouraged to work at their own pace, but Hyperslides can be assigned on a daily basis.
This Lesson Plan was created in partnership with the Birmingham Zoo.
Students will use a Venn diagram to compare lightning and static electricity. Then, students will experiment with static electricity and read nonfiction passages about lightning and lightning rods. Finally, they will apply their learning to construct a model of a lightning rod system that protects a house from a lightning-induced fire.
This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.
The lesson will begin with the teacher leading a discussion related to animal traits and the environment using a T-chart graphic organizer. The students will have the opportunity to discuss their ideas with a partner, and then the teacher will introduce the essential question of the lesson: “Can an animal's traits be influenced by the environment?” Next, the teacher will show students a video clip and nonfiction text related to the arctic fox, which is an animal that experiences a seasonal change in its fur color, and record information about the fox’s traits and habitat on a T-chart graphic organizer. Then, students will research a different animal to determine how its traits can be influenced by its environment using digital or print sources and take brief notes. Lastly, students will develop an explanatory text in a claim-evidence-reasoning format that includes an illustration to help convey their scientific ideas clearly.
Students will be given the task to build a dam that will stand against water. Students will design and build a scaled model of a dam and test the model for the ability to reduce the impact of a flood. Students will build a scaled model dam and test the dam’s effectiveness in preventing flood waters. Students will evaluate the efficacy of the dam they constructed and built. Students will contemplate what actions can be taken and materials that could be used in order to create a more effective dam in the future.
This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit.
During this lesson, students will recount a Paul Bunyan tall tale, an entertaining way to identify bodies of water and landforms in the United States. Although Paul Bunyan's Tales did not focus on Alabama, students will create their own narratives after viewing photographs of major mountain ranges, rivers, and lakes throughout Alabama (ACOS 3.2). This lesson will utilize older maps of the United States and Alabama, which are used to remind us that this folk tale was handed down orally until the early 1900s when a newspaper printed several accounts of the tall tale.
This lesson was created in partnership with the Alabama Department of Archives and History.
Students will discuss the definition of cause and effect, and the teacher will explicitly explain the definition of cause and effect as well as introduce keywords used in determining cause and effect. Students will be introduced to an informational text about dams. The teacher will model determining a cause-and-effect relationship found in the text. Next, the students will practice determining cause and effect in the same text. Students will use a cause-and-effect graphic organizer to identify cause-and-effect relationships within the informational text.
The lesson will begin with students accessing their prior knowledge of weather and climates by completing a warm-up writing prompt. Students will then move to reading texts on the subjects of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and droughts to determine if and how climate affects these weather phenomena. In groups, students will create a half-poster that describes their findings in text and pictures. At the end of the lesson, students will view a graph to extend their learning about tornadoes and hint at a future lesson while also completing an "exit ticket" as a means of summative assessment.
This lesson teaches personification as a form of figurative language. Students will be introduced to characters and objects in stories, poems, and a movie clip that possess human characteristics. This topic can be used as a stand-alone lesson or with a unit on figurative language.
This third-grade English Language Arts project lesson is focused on point of view using the zoo as a theme. The lesson includes a zoo field trip or virtual zoo field trip, class discussions, a mini scrapbook point-of-view project, and a short presentation to the class. This lesson could be modified for upper or lower grade levels.
Students talk about what makes a good story, look at the oral tradition of storytelling, and compare and contrast stories from two different cultural traditions. In this lesson, students talk about what makes a good story, look at the oral tradition of storytelling, and watch two stories from Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native oral traditions.
Understanding and creating narratives is a fundamental literacy skill—it is also a universal human activity. When students work with written texts, recite or listen to stories, or present narratives through non-verbal means, such as art or dance, they are learning to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate their world. Teachers can build rewarding experiences for students that activate their natural love for and interest in stories. They can do this in a way that expands children's fluency and confidence with the language, as well as their respect for the rich diversity of narrative approaches and language use across cultures. As students experience narratives from different cultures, they gain perspectives on people and stories in worlds that may be unfamiliar. This will be valuable to students in many ways, for example by helping them bring a sense of perspective to their own culture and stories.
Help Radly journey through 10 sci-fi levels of action. Find the barrel that matches the correct answer and blast it with your ray gun. Be careful, though, all kinds of alien bats and drones will try to stop you on your way. Pick from 7 different skills ranging from grades second through sixth in one of our fantastic robot games for kids. Skills include vocabulary, synonyms, antonyms, cause and effect, making inferences, and context clues.
In this unit, students tell their own stories and explore the stories of other Americans. Hearing and telling these stories helps students realize that social studies is not simply the study of history, but an exploration of real people and their lives. Students begin by telling stories about their personal experiences. They then explore the character traits that promote democratic ideals and tell stories about family members who exemplify these traits. Finally, they conduct research and share stories about famous Americans. Practiced skills include reading, researching, visually representing, writing, and presenting.
Can athletes' moves be described as beautiful? How are grace, beauty, and aesthetics expressed through movement? These and many other questions will provide the framework for students' exploration of poetry in motion of athletes who participate in a variety of sports. Examining examples from their own experiences and from popular media, students learn about the aesthetic elements of athletics. After viewing images of various athletes, students create a class word wall with adjectives that describe movement. Students then write in reflective journals, view and interpret media, conduct Internet research, take digital photographs, and create original poems. As a culminating activity, the teacher presents students' poetry to the class in a multimedia presentation.
The goal of this lesson is to introduce the academic vocabulary of economics and financial literacy through children's books. In Babymouse: Cupcake Tycoon, there are a variety of economics and financial literacy vocabulary words embedded in the text, which involve a school fundraiser. Through a think-aloud read-aloud, the lesson will illustrate how to introduce key economic concepts/vocabulary through the story. Students use puppets to conduct interviews about economics vocabulary in the story and then create vocabulary cards. As a final project, they create video posters, using either PowerPoint or Glogster.
In this unit, students will use thematically related texts, organized from least to the most complex, to gather a word bank of supporting details and content vocabulary about a concept. Then they use these words as a basis for writing acrostic poems, which support organization of information around a central idea, as the lines of an acrostic poem are held together by the topic or main idea spelled vertically.
This classroom resource includes engaging activities to teach basic grammar concepts while developing vocabulary and spelling proficiency. A list of several amusing and informative grammar-themed picture books supply read-aloud examples for a review of nouns and adjectives and an introduction to gerunds. Students themselves refer to the books from the list of materials, plus appropriate dictionaries and glossaries, as they engage in a word-sort activity that provides practice in the spelling changes that can occur when verbs are turned into gerunds. Diamante poems are introduced through handouts and websites, and students compose original, structured poems in this form—first as a class and then independently—using an online interactive tool. Printable handouts and links are included.
Poetry offers many opportunities for wordplay and learning about language. But because poetry can seem inaccessible, many students approach poetry writing with trepidation. This lesson for third and fourth-grade students is designed to overcome student fears by using a traditional poem to teach students about alliteration. After reading the book A My Name Is... by Alice Lyne, students use a variety of print and online resources to brainstorm their own alliterative word lists. They then create a poetry link that uses the traditional poem they have read together as a framework for their own poems.
In this lesson, students learn about alliteration from picture books by author/illustrator, Pamela Duncan Edwards. Using the books' illustrations for inspiration, students write original alliterative sentences and share them with the class. As the lesson continues, students practice using alliteration to create acrostic poems, alphabet books, number books, and tongue twisters.
Each day at the end of their independent reading time, students give Book Boosts, one-minute raves about books they've read. Students select a book that they really enjoyed and then give a one-minute talk that generates interest in the book but does not give away the book's ending. Students can boost their books in a variety of ways, including creating alternate book covers, designing posters or flyers, or making promotional bookmarks. Have students take turns giving book boosts with two students giving a Book Boost each class day. These Book Boosts are easy ways to suggest a multitude of titles to students, and they act as a way for students to have something to think about as they read.
This lesson helps students improve their writing abilities and their attention to detail while experiencing a new technology called Descriptive Video. Also known as described programming, Descriptive Video refers to programming with an additional audio track that narrates a film's visual elements. Students watch the opening scene of the standard version of the Disney film The Lion King and write a description of it. They then watch the same opening scene with the descriptions and captions available online at the National Center for Accessible Media. They will write another descriptive summary of this scene. Students share their two writing samples aloud and compare their pre- and post-audio descriptions.
During this lesson, students are introduced to the concept of working dogs and how they help society. Students read a variety of texts, learn relevant vocabulary, participate in purposeful writing, and are encouraged to share their perspectives. An inquiry model called POWER is used, in addition to a vocabulary strategy called Word Storms, which is designed to help students speak and write critically about the texts they read. Most of the resources for the lesson are found online.
Bam! Beep! Zoom! Students are sure to delight in the study of onomatopoetic words through the use of comic strips. In this lesson, students begin with an introduction to onomatopoeia, which describes words that imitate the natural sound associated with an action or object. As a class, students view several comic strips and are guided in identifying examples of onomatopoeia. The group then discusses the purpose of onomatopoeia and its effect in a story before students work individually to find examples of onomatopoeia in other comics. Finally, students work individually or in pairs to create their own comic books that include onomatopoeic language. After presenting their comics to the class, students discuss the use of onomatopoeia and its effectiveness in each comic strip.
In this collaborative inquiry unit, the real gold is the inquiry skills and content area knowledge that students develop. The class works in small groups, each focusing on one aspect of the same big topic, such as the Gold Rush. After skimming related texts, the class brainstorms people, places, and things associated with the topic and develops a list of five or six main subtopics. Students then work in small groups to research one of the subtopics, practicing specific research skills as they work. Finally, students choose an activity, such as an oral report, trivia game, or newspaper, to teach what they have learned to the rest of the class. Group accountability and individual responsibility are built into this lesson process.While this unit uses the Gold Rush as an example, any event or geographical area could be substituted.
A piece of math-related children's literature, Sixteen Cows, is used to demonstrate the strategy of problem-posing. After hearing the story read aloud, students are invited to brainstorm some literary and mathematical observations of the story. With the teacher's guidance, students then turn those observations into "what-if" mathematical extensions. These extensions become mathematical problems that students solve, both individually and as a whole class. Since this strategy highlights changing attributes of a story, it underscores for children the range of choices that authors have.
Before there were weather tools, people looked to the sky, plants, and animals for hints about what the weather would do. To remember these indicators, people coined weather sayings. But are these sayings true and reliable? This lesson explores the truth and reliability of weather-related sayings, such as, “Mare's tails and mackerel scales make tall ships take in their sails.” Students brainstorm weather sayings and then investigate the accuracy and origins of the sayings in predicting the weather, using print and online resources in their research. Next, students write about and illustrate their weather sayings and then share their results with their classmates. Finally, students discuss skepticism and when it may be a good response to information that is presented to them as fact.
This lesson supports third through fifth-grade students as they apply think-aloud strategies to reading, as well as to the composition of artwork and poetry. Activities include collaborative as well as individual work. Technology tools are integrated as students research symbols of peace and as they prewrite, compose, and publish their poetry.
Students' vocabulary is expanded and their writing is enriched when they are encouraged to use a variety of adjectives to help readers "see, taste, and feel" what they've written. In this unit for grades 3 through 5, picture books are used as a springboard for helping students define, identify, and practice using adjectives and synonyms. They develop webbed lists and then put their new vocabulary skills to use by writing form poems.
Diversity is celebrated in this lesson in which students embark on a cultural research project by first reading a variety of alphabet books about world cultures, including D is for Doufu: An Alphabet Book of Chinese Culture by Maywan Shen Krach. They then select a culture to study and work in groups to conduct research into the history and symbols of their selected culture. The unit includes tools for conducting primary interviews and other research techniques. The project culminates with each group writing and illustrating a cultural alphabet book based on their research. Groups share their work with the class and invited guests during a Diversity Celebration.
This lesson is a great way to teach both scientific and English content to a class, although the teacher can easily choose another book and subject area. In this lesson, students listen to poems in the book Science Verse by Jon Scieszka. Students then create diamante, acrostic, or theme poems with illustrations. To help increase fluency, students read their poems to the class. Finally, students create original poems using facts they have learned in the current science curriculum.
Using One Leaf Rides the Wind by Celeste Davidson Mannis as an introductory text, students learn to identify elements of haiku poetry. Students go on a class hike to observe nature in their own neighborhood and collect "picturesque" words in their writer's notebooks. They explore syllable counts in their word collections and use descriptive words to compose an original haiku. Students then use print and online resources to locate facts for informational notes on the topics of their poems. Finally, students work collaboratively to publish their poetry and notes in an illustrated class book.