Cluster 2: Presentation of Knowledge and IdeasArchived

Students will learn about Everglades ecosystems as they “travel” through the plant communities of the Everglades watershed. 

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will conduct close readings of a teacher-selected news article that introduces a claim and two sides. As they read, they will implement vocabulary strategies, analyze the article’s claims and their validity. After they read, they will participate in a whole class discussion before choosing a side and writing a three-paragraph argument in the form of a letter.

Type: Lesson Plan

This MEA requires students to design a custom snowboard for five Olympic athletes, taking into consideration how their height and weight affect the design elements of a snowboard. There are several factors that go into the design of a snowboard, and the students must use reasoning skills to determine which factors are more important and why, as well as what factors to eliminate or add based on the athlete's style and preferences. After the students have designed a board for each athlete, they will report their procedure and reasons for their decisions.

Type: Lesson Plan

Dramatizing life stories provides students with an engaging way to become more critical readers and researchers. In this lesson, students select American authors to research, create timelines, and write bio-poems. Then, they collaborate with other students in small groups to design and perform a 'panel of authors' 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. There are tons of additional links and resources included in this lesson plan!

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will learn about the Florida Panther, threats to it's survival and the role of wildlife corridors as an attempt to reduce roadway fatalities. Students will participate in a game simulating panther crossings, learn about panthers from a guest speaker or teacher, and participate in a mock town hall meeting evaluating the construction of wildlife corridors.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will take a previously written research paper and adapt it into a speech. A PowerPoint is included to help students with the adaption of their speech as they focus on purpose/task and audience. Information is also provided on how to organize their speech and how to deliver their speech (gestures, eye contact, posture, voice inflection, etc.). In preparation for writing and presenting their own speech, students will use a graphic organizer to analyze three different speeches in regards to content and delivery. A speech outline/flowchart is provided to help students brainstorm and organize their own speech. A speech rubric is provided for the summative assessment, along with a visual aid rubric.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will explore poetic expression, both written and spoken, and evaluate its significance as a medium for social commentary. Students will also examine literary devices including metaphor, simile, symbolism, and point of view.

Type: Lesson Plan

How would the story have changed if Romeo had received the letter? This lesson encourages students to pick a turning point in a tragedy and show how the action of the play would have been significantly altered had a different decision been made or a different action taken. Students use a graphic organizer to analyze the plot of the play. They identify a turning point in the play, alter the decision that the characters make, and predict the characters' actions throughout the rest of the play. Students create a plot outline of their altered play and present their new stories to the class. Teachers can test students' content knowledge and understanding of conflicts within the play while also challenging their creativity and their understanding of plot. This lesson focuses on Shakespearean tragedy, but it can be used with any tragedy that students have read or as a book report alternative.

Type: Lesson Plan

The focus of this MEA is oil spills and their effect on the environment. In this activity, students from a fictitious class are studying about the effects of an oil spill on marine ecosystems and have performed an experiment in which they were asked to try to rid a teaspoon of corn oil from a baking pan filled with two liters of water as thoroughly as possible in a limited timeframe and with limited resources. By examining, analyzing, and evaluating experimental data related to resource usage, disposal, and labor costs, students must face the tradeoffs that are involved in trying to preserve an ecosystem when time, money, and resources are limited.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson students should be able to :

• Identify appropriate SI units for measuring speed.
• Compare and contrast average speed and instantaneous speed.
• Interpret position-time graphs.
• Calculate the speed of an object using slopes.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson students will learn to:

1. Identify changes in motion that produce acceleration.
2. Describe examples of objects moving with constant acceleration.
3. Calculate the acceleration of an object, analytically, and graphically.
4. Interpret velocity-time graph, and explain the meaning of the slope.
5. Classify acceleration as positive, negative, and zero.
6. Describe instantaneous acceleration.

Type: Lesson Plan

The Alternative Fuel Systems MEA provides students with an engineering problem in which they must develop a procedure to decide the appropriate course for an automobile manufacturer to take given a set of constraints. The main focus of the MEA is to apply the concepts of work and energy to a business model.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will investigate interacting forces between two objects.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is the first lesson in a unit of three lessons focusing on spoken word poetry. In the first lesson, students will read, view, and analyze the figurative language in several poems in print and on video. Students will then write original poems based on their own lives, that includes poetic devices. Students will then present their original poems to the class using appropriate intonation, inflection, and fluency.

Type: Lesson Plan

Using inquiry techniques, students, working in groups, are asked to design and conduct experiments to test the Law of Conservation of Energy and the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Upon being provided with textbooks, rulers, measuring tapes, stopwatches, mini-storage containers, golf balls, marbles, rubber balls, steel balls, and pennies, they work cooperatively to implement and revise their hypotheses. With limited guidance from the teacher, students are able to visualize the relationships between mass, velocity, height, gravitational potential energy, kinetic energy, and total energy as well as the relationships between mass, velocity, and momentum.

Type: Lesson Plan

Using inquiry techniques, students, working in groups, are asked to design and conduct an experiment to test Newton's Second Law of Motion. Upon being provided with textbooks, rulers, measuring tapes, mini-storage containers, golf balls, marbles, rubber balls, steel balls, and pennies they work cooperatively to implement and revise their hypotheses. With limited guidance from the teacher, students are able to visualize the direct relationships between force and mass; force and acceleration; and the inverse relationship between mass and acceleration.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will investigate how acceleration of an object is affected by the mass of the object and by the applied force on the object.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students compete with one another to design and build a roller coaster from insulation tubing and tape that will allow a marble to travel from start to finish with the lowest average velocity. In so doing, students learn about differences between distance and displacement, speed and velocity, and potential and kinetic energy. They also examine the Law of Conservation of Energy and concepts related to force and motion.

Type: Lesson Plan

The topic of this MEA is work and power. Students will be assigned the task of hiring employees to complete a given task. In order to make a decision as to which candidates to hire, the students initially must calculate the required work. The power each potential employee is capable of, the days they are available to work, the percentage of work-shifts they have missed over the past 12 months, and the hourly pay rate each worker commands will be provided to assist in the decision process. Full- and/or part-time positions are available. Through data analysis, the students will need to evaluate which factors are most significant in the hiring process. For instance, some groups may prioritize speed of work, while others prioritize cost or availability/dependability.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this activity, students will utilize measurement data provided in a chart to calculate areas, volumes, and densities of cookies. They will then analyze their data and determine how these values can be used to market a fictitious brand of chocolate chip cookie. Finally, they will integrate cost and taste into their analyses and generate a marketing campaign for a cookie brand of their choosing based upon a set sample data which has been provided to them.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is a culminating activity for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. By breaking down the Shakespearean language and paraphrasing the text to modern day language, students will use their new dialogue to transform their new version of the text into a short video. Students will deliver an oral presentation to the class to explain the choices they made in their new version of the scene.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will gather information on aspects of the 1930s and the Great Depression including how they are linked to current issues and events, then create a presentation based on their findings and present it to the class. This lesson will help to build background knowledge for reading literature set in the 1930s and would be a good activity to complete before reading texts that take place during that period. This activity will develop students' research skills including evaluating sources, note-taking, and integrating information from multiple sources, as well as giving students opportunities to engage in creating digital presentations.

Type: Lesson Plan

The Turning Tires MEA provides students with an engineering problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best tire material for certain situations. The main focus of the MEA is applying surface area concepts and algebra through modeling.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will explore the concepts of individual rights and freedoms as opposed to the good of society using currently relevant topics. Students will participate in small-group and teacher-led discussions, research, collaboration, and debate to gain understanding and to present their findings and conclusions, supported by evidence, about the issues and implications of their assigned topics. Supporting materials will enable the teacher to guide students to consider, explore, and respond to the guiding question of whether it"s appropriate in a democratic society to give up essential liberties for temporary safety.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is the first of three interrelated lessons in a unit which use text and fine arts (photography and paintings) to convey the theme(s) of immigration, shared American ideals, and civic responsibilities in a democracy. The first lesson asks students to analyze "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus. Students' understanding of text and earlier waves of immigration will be fostered by viewing photographs of immigrants to Ellis Island.

Type: Lesson Plan

This teaching idea addresses the pros and cons of discussion by analyzing the concept of utopia in a satire. Students collaborate in small groups to create a Discussion Web that addresses the question, "Are people equal?" Students engage in meaningful discussions analyzing all sides of their initial response, form a consensus, and present it to the class. Students then read "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and use supporting details to complete another Discussion Web that examines whether or not the people in the story are equal. Web-based graphic organizers, assessments, and extension activities are included.

Type: Teaching Idea

Students will use teaching strategies as they read and discuss Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's memoir Night. Everyone in the classroom takes a turn assuming the "teacher" role in a reciprocal teaching activity, as the class works with four comprehension strategies: predicting, question generating, summarizing, and clarifying.

Type: Teaching Idea

This is a 10 day overview from the Library of Congress on a Historical Perspective of the time period surrounding To Kill A Mockingbird. Includes a lot of primary resources and writing activities.

Type: Teaching Idea

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

Things That Are features a mystery: How can a 17-year-old girl who is blind and learning how to deal with her disability help an elusive fugitive wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)? In this unit, students learn how this teen manages her own life, including finding her way in the community, keeping on top of school work, and, more importantly, nurturing a special relationship, as they work to cite textual evidence to support text analysis, participate in collaborative discussions to determine and analyze its theme and how complex characters are developed, and give a presentation of their findings and supporting evidence.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

After taking a virtual tour of The Globe Theater in Elizabethan London, students use graphic organizers to compare attending a performance at The Globe to attending a current professional production (such as a play on Broadway) or to viewing a movie at a local theater. They discuss the similarities and differences in the theaters and imagine what types of products might have been advertised in Elizabethan time, if The Globe showed commercials before the play like modern movie theaters do. They then work collaboratively in small groups to create a commercial advertisement geared toward an Elizabethan audience to promote one of today's products or conveniences. This activity helps students better understand the Elizabethan times and Elizabethan theater audiences, as well as persuasive advertising techniques.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

Dramatizing life stories provides students with an engaging way to become more critical readers and researchers. In this lesson, students select American authors to research, create timelines and biopoems, and then collaborate in 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.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

This lesson asks students to explore the motivation behind characters' actions in To Kill a Mockingbird. Students first engage in a free-write 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.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence