Looking for ways to plan project based learning activities? Suzie Boss suggests borrowing ideas from your colleagues and adapt or remix to fit your context.

Suzie borrowed ideas from professional development and learning conferences for teachers who may need a boost to get their project-based learning off the ground.

This video clip is meant to serve as a writing or discussion prompt during a unit on forces and motion. This can be used at varied grade levels, with the expectation that student responses would be more complex in higher grade levels.

After gaining skill through anazlying a historic and contemporary speech as a class, students will select a famous speech from a list (included) and write an essay that identifies and explains the rhetorical strategies that the author chose while crafting an effective speech. The analysis will consider questions such as: What makes a good argument? How did the author's rhetoric evoke a response from the audience? Why are the words still famous today?

In this lesson students learn to evaluate political cartoons for their meaning, message, and persuasiveness. Students first develop critical questions about political cartoons. Then they access an online activity to learn about artistic techniques cartoonists frequently use. Finally, students will work in small groups to analyze a political cartoon.

In this activity, students will work in collaborative groups to create 9M x 9M models of plant and animal cells. Class population can be split into 2 or 4 groups, with half the students constructing animal cells and the other half constructing plant cells. Students must organize and assign duties, provide materials for this activity, and write a written report. They will also give "Cell Tours" to other students and/or classroom guests.

How are magnetism and electricity related? In this lesson, students will explore the relationship between magnetism and electricity, learn how to construct an electromagnet, and discover everyday uses of electromagnets. Students will create a multimedia presentation in which they will demonstrate their knowledge of electromagnetism.

In this lesson, students select American authors to research, create timelines and biopoems, and then collaborate on teams to design and perform a panel presentation in which they role-play as their authors. The final project requires each student to synthesize information about his or her author in an essay.

Teachers generally warn student writers to avoid sentence fragments but professional writers use sentence fragments effectively for a variety of reasons. Using Edgar Schuster's study of sentence fragments from "The Best American Essays," this lesson encourages students to examine fragments in action, determine their effective rhetorical uses, and reflect on their own uses of sentence fragments.

This brochure assignment teaches how shifting purposes and audiences can create change in a student’s writing. After exploring published brochures, students determine key questions, research a topic and work through the writing process to create their own informative brochure complete with visuals.

Part of NCSSM CORE collection: This is the document for the bromate iodide rate law lab.

Students are prompted to challenge their notion of synonyms being words that "mean the same" by investigating key words in Robert Frost's poem, "Choose Something Like a Star." First, they build an understanding of connotation and register by categorizing synonyms for the title word, "choose." Then they develop lists of synonyms for words of their choice elsewhere in the poem and collaborate on a full analysis, focusing on the relationship between word choice and the elements of speaker, subject, and tone.

In this activity, students will use Coulomb's law and vector principles to determine the number of electrons which are transferred to a balloon as the result of 10 average-strength rubs on animal fur. Students will complete a formal lab write-up at the conclusion of the activity.

In this lesson, teachers scaffold student reading of websites that highlight science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. Before choosing a text for close reading, the teacher models how to "read" the variety of texts and features of different websites, including images and interactives. Then the teacher models a close reading with students, setting a purpose and asking text-dependent questions to help students find evidence, use inferencing skills, and peer edit.

This lesson asks students to explore the motivation behind characters' actions in To Kill a Mockingbird. Students first engage in a freewrite activity. They then do research and creative thinking to design a poster and plan a presentation representing a psychological profile for a selected character, while determining what specific factors (such as family, career, environment, and so forth) have the greatest influence on the characters' decision making throughout the novel. The groups present their findings to the class by assuming the persona of their character and explaining the psychological factors influencing their behavior in the novel

Students analyze characters by noting the ways in which defining moments shape their personalities in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Students will chart changes, note the “direction” of their characters, support their conclusions with textual evidence, and present their findings.

In this lesson, students will work collaboratively to create a presentation featuring an electrostatics demonstration. The demonstration should deal with some aspect of the three basic principles of electrostatics. Each group will also submit a written descripton of their demonstration.

In this lesson, students will begin writing an outline for their paper, organizing their claims and supporting evidence for each claim. Students will complete an outline tool.

In this physics lab students will investigate whether Ohm's Law applies to common electric devices (incandescent light bulbs and LEDs). Students will design a controlled experiment, including a written procedure, and then conduct the experiment, collect and graph data. Students may submit their findings in a formal written report or through informal class discussion.

In this lesson, students will continue to draft their research paper, focusing on cohesion and transitions as they create their draft.

In this lab activity, students will gather evidence that total system momentum is conserved in an explosion-like impulse between two stationary carts and to describe how the evidence supports the law of conservation of momentum. Students will produce a formal lab write-up at the conclusion of the activity.