In this activity, students conduct research about the sun and then write questions that might be used in an interview of the sun.

 Upon completion of genre study on poetry, students will create their own limerick.  While reading poems in their Wonders Literature Anthology and Student Reading / Writing Companion, students will learn about inventions through various poem structures.  Students will be provided with a list of inventors to research, selecting an invention to create their own limerick while using “Cold Feet”, “Our Washing Machine” and “Bugged” (p.166) as a model.  Students must include poetry elements such as metaphors / similes, alliteration and rhyming words in their written poem.  Students will record themselves reading their poem using their Chromebook, upload their video into Google Slides and include a photo representation of the invention.

Students prepare a news report that highlights problems facing coastal communities and how climate change might affect coastal populations.

Students previously looked at maps of Michigan and discussed some of the cities and regions in our state. In reading, students began to read narratives, both fiction and nonfiction. For the entry event, students were asked to select an artifact that represented a special, small moment they experienced within the state of Michigan.

Students shared their artifacts and stories and plotted the setting from their stories on a map of Michigan. We realized our stories represented many regions in Michigan and could be used to describe many aspects of life as a Michigander. Students wanted to share these stories with others, so we began learning about narrative writing.

Typically, I use Google Slides for a mini-lesson, to allow students time to work on a specific, standard related task that will help build their Michigan small moment story, and then pull them together to share a few examples of student work. Students sometimes work alone, but often work with a partner or small group to brainstorm ideas, revise, and edit.

After, students will publish their ideas on Google Docs. When completed, they'll put their doc onto Google Sites or Google Slides and incorporate other media to enhance their story. Then, we'll print the story and create book covers using the iPad app Canva. We'll use both models to share with other classes within our school and hopefully with students from another country (I'm still working on finding an international school).

In this lesson, students write a first draft of their Freaky Frog Trading Card paragraph in first person using vivid, precise words and phrases in their writing.

This lesson accompanies the North Carolina children's book, "My NC from A to Z" which celebrates pride of place, and creates connections to North Carolina's rich African American heritage. In this lesson, students will identify different genres of music by NC African American artists and diverse musical regions of North Carolina. Students will create a "train route map" to understand the Great Migration and how Raleigh was a key point of train departure. Students will retell biographies of select musicians and artists using the Great Migration as a backdrop for cross-cultural influences.

After the teacher shows students her online timeline she has created of her own life, she will instruct higher level students to create an online timeline of the life of someone famous/historically significant.  If the class is studying famous African-Americans who have contributed to history, the teacher could assign a famous African-American (or if the class is studying U.S. Presidents, a president could be assigned to each student).  Students will research the famous/historically significant person which they are assigned from books and the internet.  Then students will create an online timeline of the person to share with the class in a presentation.  This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

After the teacher has led a discussion about how we depend on the physical environment and natural resources to meet basic needs and how challenging/impossible it would be to live without all of the resources our environment provides us with, she will lead a discussion with students about how people affect the environment (positively and negatively). Then higher-level students will be asked to write creative skits to inform the audience of ways that people affect the environment and the consequences that humans and animals may face due to the negative effects that we have caused in the environment.  After the higher-level students have written the skits, all students in the class will participate in acting out the skits.  This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

Higher-level students will individually identify a problem in the school, and they will think critically to find ways to solve the problem.  Then each student will write a persuasive letter to the principal describing the problem, detailing why it is a problem, and offering a solution to solve the problem.  Students will have experience with real-life problem-solving through this project.  This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

Students will learn how to do basic research on animals that they have read about in a Jan Brett book.*remix includes google slides, ideas for remote learning and a creative writing activity.

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade ELA.

This resource accompanies our Rethink 3rd Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning.  

This course was created by the Rethink Education Content Development Team. This course is aligned to the NC Standards for 3rd Grade English Language Arts. 

Students will play the role of newspaper reporters in order to research, write, and publish an article about the history of the Star-Spangled Banner. This is connected with the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC.

This writing activity for gifted learners might serve as a culminating activity or final assessment as part of a larger fiction-based genre study. Students will take part in close readings of a variety of fictional genres throughout the unit, such as parables, fables, folktales, fairy tales, myths, novels, and even poetry.  In this activity, gifted learners would work independently to close read The 13 Clocks by James Thurber. They will work to decipher the story and it’s genre, analyzing major components of the story (such as a central message, characters, setting, and/or events in the story) and evaluating those components by the various genre criteria they learned about in class and through their own online research.  This will culminate in an opinion piece arguing as to the genre of The 13 Clocks and potentially the creation of a new genre.  This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

After the teacher has led a discussion about how we depend on the physical environment and natural resources to meet basic needs, students will begin to help her make a list on the board of natural resources that we depend on and need for our survival.  Students may list things such as:  trees for lumber to build houses and furniture, water from springs and rivers, plants to eat and use for medicinal purposes, animals for food and food products, etc.  Then higher-level students will research the Pilgrims and create a poster to show all the ways they had to depend on natural resources and the environment for survival.  This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

Using Wonders Literature Anthology and students Reading/Writing Companion, students will learn “What we know about Earth and its neighbors”.  Students will read about discoveries in space and how we learn more about our solar system.  After reading texts from Wonders using literature anthology and student reading writing companion, students will be placed in 9 groups (representing one planet each) and conduct research on their planet.  Students will create a one pager displaying a drawing or image of their planet with six facts (facts must include size, temperature, and an option of four other facts).  Students will then utilize Makey Makey to conduct an oral presentation of their project by coding and recording facts.  After completion, students will do a Gallery Walk to visit each planet while completing interactive guided note sheet in Google Slides.

 This activity is in place of Research and Inquiry project on page 111 and 121 of student reading / writing companion In this lesson, students can choose from a list of historical figures to create a research project. Students will be asked to create a digital timeline of that person, and include images, audio, and/or video on their timeline that they find throughout their research. Each student will be asked to present their timeline to the rest of the class.

In this lesson, students will use thematically related texts, organized from least to 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.