In this lesson, students will learn the reasons for the Stamp Act, the colonists' reactions to the Stamp Act, and the impact of the Stamp Act on the pocketbooks of American colonists. Students will organize their thoughts into a three-paragraph essay in which they address the reasons for, opposition to, and impact of the Stamp Act. These essays should include direct references and quotations from the primary sources as support for their arguments.

During a study of the US Constitution and after students have already read the Constitution, students explore the philosophical underpinnings of it and decide which of the different influences on it ultimately had the biggest impact on the Founding Fathers’ thinking. 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.

In this lesson, students will explore proverbs and adages.  After reading the selection Where’s Brownie? In Wonders Unit 4, students will be shown a video explaining proverbs and adages further. (Students will complete pages 133 and 137 in their Reading and Writing Companion during a shared reading and reread.)  Students will then play Adage Charades and create a Jamboard where groups (PIG) research and choose several adages/proverbs to create posters of.  Groups will then present to the class sharing what they learned.

This lesson will be taught before reading the Paired Selection “From Tale to Table” in Wonders Unit 2.  In this lesson students will experience why it is important to present and follow concise instructions. First, students will share directions on how to complete a simple task.  The teacher will attempt to demonstrate the student’s steps exactly as told. Students will create steps for a “How to Activity” where they will create the steps. Students will use Dash robots to attempt to follow the steps, integrating coding and sequencing. Groups will get the chance to “test out” the other groups’ “How to Activities”. 

After reading their Wonders anchor text, “Winter’s Tail”, students will be asked to create their own jamboard poster of how Winter impacted the trainers and others who helped with her recovery. Using expository writing techniques and learned vocabulary from the anchor text, students will articulate Winter impacted humans. Students should be able to talk about the positives of the human impact (such as how the Clearwater Marine Aquarium used technology to save Winter’s life). Students should be encouraged to use evidence from the text, images, and anything else to show how an animal can impact a human.

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.

In this lesson, students get to flex their writing muscles as they use a variety of writing genres to create a zine of their own: letter writing, persuasive writing, narrative, acrostic poetry, comic writing, and biography/autobiography. Students choose a prominent figure from popular culture as the focus for a multigenre zine and then plan the project using the Facts–Questions–Interpretations method. Students then write in each of the listed genres about their chosen subjects, using a variety of ReadWriteThink.org tools. Finally, students design covers for their projects, and the teacher binds all the printed documents into individual zines.