Students learn alternatives to the classic classroom assignment, the book report.
- Provider:
- New York Times
- Author:
- Shannon Doyne and Katherine Schulten
- Date Added:
- 06/24/2019
Students learn alternatives to the classic classroom assignment, the book report.
In this lesson, students work in cooperative groups to prepare presentations on business organization and Big Business during the second part of the Industrial Revolution (1860-1910) in the United States.
This lesson is designed to help students prepare to read a historical novel. Students are required to complete research pertaining to the work's setting, time-period or decade. Afterwards, students use the online site and software, Prezi, to communicate and share their findings.
This lesson focuses on the music through which those hardships were expressed and on the daily lives of southern blacks in the sharecropping era. It is structured around an imagined road trip through Mississippi. Students will "stop" in two places: Yazoo City, where they will learn about the sorts of natural disasters that periodically devastated already-struggling poor southerners, and Hillhouse, where they will learn about the institution of sharecropping. They will study a particular Country Blues song at each "stop" and examine it as a window onto the socioeconomic conditions of the people who created it. Students will create a scrapbook of their journey, in which they will record and analyze what they have learned about the difficulty of eking out a living in the age of sharecropping.
The repercussions of the Great Migration are far-reaching. Today, much of the restlessness and struggle that the Blues helped to articulate in the Migration era remains central in other forms of American music, including Hip Hop. In this lesson, students look to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as case studies that illustrate why African Americans left the South in record numbers and how communities came together in new urban environments, often around the sound of the Blues.
In this lesson, students will trace some of the technological developments that made the electric guitar possible. Using a variety of Internet sources, students will conduct research into some of the early models, including the hollow-bodied Gibson ES-150, introduced in 1936, and the Fender Telecaster, the first mass-marketed solid-body electric guitar, introduced in 1952, at the dawn of the Rock and Roll era. They will explore not only how these instruments transformed the Blues sound, but how they laid the groundwork for the development of the electric guitar as an essential Rock and Roll instrument.
The subject of this lesson is the music of which Fats Domino speaks: the R&B of the pre-Rock and Roll era.
After reading a play, students create a resume for one of the characters. Students first discuss what they know about resumes, then select a character from the play to focus on. Next, they search online for historical background information. Using supporting details from the play, students then draft resumes for their characters and search a job listing site for which their character is qualitfied.
This is a collection of discussion questions and activities to supplement The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin Jr.
Students become novice lexicographers as they explore recent new entries to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), learn the process of writing entries for the OED, and write a new entry themselves. Students will follow up their entry with a persuasive essay and a competition in which the strongest contender for the title of New Word is chosen. Extensions will offer students a chance to evaluate old lists of "new words" and discuss the power dynamics of dictionaries.
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.
This lesson highlights the changing relationship between the city center and the suburb in the postwar decades, especially in the 1950s. Students will look at the legislation leading up to and including the Federal Highway Act of 1956. They will also examine documents about the history of Levittown, the most famous and most important of the postwar suburban planned developments.
The selection "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker explores the role heritage and culture played in an individual's understanding of his or her life and identity. In this lesson, students will understand the contributions of past and present and interpret and analyze the ideas of family and hertiage through the use of theme and metaphors.
In this geochemistry activity, students explore a STELLA model of anhydrite-solution equilibrium. They find ways to illustrate several points about chemical equilibrium that address common misconceptions using this model. Then they write a mock research paper about addressing common misconceptions about chemical equilibrium in the classroom. Note: A free demo of STELLA can be downloaded at: http://www.iseesystems.com/
In this lesson, students will research and prepare an almanac on the Arctic. They then examine the laws that attempt to provide jurisdiction over this area and consider how these laws will be affected if geography of the Arctic continues to change due to the effects of global warming.
In this lesson, students will research a variety of chromosomal abnormalities and resulting syndromes to determine risk factors and contributors of the abnormality, and characteristics of the syndromes.
This resource is a guideline to citing sources and parenthetical documentation for a research paper.
Students conduct research about a type of natural event, learn why it occurs, where the probable locations of occurrence are, what causes damage, what conditions create especially destructive events, and what the probability of a destructive event is. It is important that students spend some time thinking about possible ways to reduce the negative impact of damaging natural events to reduce fear and increase empowerment.
This lesson is designed to provide students with an overview of regional climate variations around the world and promote discussion of factors that create differences in climate around the world. This assignment provides an introduction to the complexities of the climate system by requiring each student to gather information about one region or country, then synthesize that with information provided by other students.