To review and pre-teach content material, this fun and engaging 100th Day of School activity is a great way to get students interested in the major historical events of the last 100 years. To begin the activity, the teacher will either write on the whiteboard or announce that today the class is going to assume the role of Historical Investigators, revealing the most exciting events in history over the last 100 years. The teacher will then group the students into groups of 2-4 based on the class size. The teacher will pass out the investigation sheet, and direct students to open the Google Slide presentation. The teacher will model how to select and research a given historical event using credible sources. 

This task asks students to base their arguments on their own strong feelings within the context of having just read 12 Angry Men. ** This performance assessment was developed by a collaborative team of teachers and division staff from Middlesex, Poquoson, and West Point school divisions.

The ABC’s of Anne Frank performance based assessment is designed to help students develop informational writing skills with a specific audience and purpose in mind. Students must convey their knowledge of Anne Frank to younger students, specifically fifth graders, in a format that integrates writing, research, and design. The assessment promotes critical thinking by making students convey the tragic and often graphic nature of the Holocaust and life of Anne Frank in a way that is suitable for a young audience. The assessment gives each student depth of knowledge about World War II, the Holocaust, and the life of Anne Frank, promoting metacognition well beyond the reading of the play. It is the culminating activity in a unit on Anne Frank that includes readings in the genres of nonfiction and drama.** This performance assessment was developed by a collaborative team of teachers and division staff from Middlesex, Poquoson, and West Point school divisions.

This resource is a comprehensive unit of instruction created and piloted by the ACSE Region III team over the 2022-23 school year. This unit, which is accessible through multiple links to include worksheets, slidedecks, teacher suggestions and planning documents, includes all components of the instruction with SOL connections and is intended to join Computer Science standards to an ELA content area.

Your students are archeologists at the Jamestown Settlement.  The settlement directors (teachers) would like to include information on the new website, and the students have been asked to make a program (ie presentation) on settlers first arriving in Jamestown and their first few years there.  They must target this program to people who are not familiar with the Jamestown settlement to attract their attention and curiosity to want to see more of the settlement and get them to come visit Jamestown.  Their program’s artifact should include pictures of real artifacts, maps, etc to help explain the sequence (ie timeline) of events or tell the story of the beginning of the settlement.  They should include a brief explanation with each slide.  They will present their presentation to peers who will give feedback as potential visitors to Jamestown.

Information Technology is a broad field to learn about. Within IT there are many careers. This lesson is designed to help engage the students in the IT field where they will be able to research and discover various jobs they are interested in. Students will discover the education requirments, possible benefits of different jobs, salary, hiring demad, and growth potential in the field.The activities include: brainstorming, compare and contrast, research, writing,  and using software either in Google or Microsoft.

Students will create a flowchart showing the evolution of a specific technology including failed attempts at advancement. This task includes research and understanding the iterative process. Easily differentiated. 

This writer’s reference condenses and covers everything a beginning writing student needs to successfully compose college-level work, including the basics of composition, grammar, and research. It is broken down into easy-to-tackle sections, while not overloading students with more information than they need. Great for any beginning writing students or as reference for advanced students!

In this unit, students read the core texts The Hundred Dresses and Garvey's Choice as a way of exploring what it means to be accepting and tolerant of themselves and others. The Hundred Dresses challenges students to think about the different roles associated with bullying through the eyes of the narrator, who struggles with her own involvement with a classmate who is bullied. Garvey's Choice illustrates the way others influence the way we see ourselves, both positively and negatively, and the power of accepting ourselves by tracing Garvey's path to self-discovery and acceptance. Both texts are full of moments and messages that are easily relatable for students at this grade level. Therefore, it is our hope that the experiences of the characters in both texts will serve as a neutral launching point for deeper discussions about bullying, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness.

In reading, the main focus of the unit is on identifying and tracing the central message across a longer text. Over the course of the text, students will develop a deep understanding of each character's thoughts, feelings, and motivations, which will help them identify and explain how the central message is developed and conveyed through the characters. Students will also begin to understand how successive parts of a text build on each other to push the plot forward. Particularly with Garvey's Choice, students will analyze the genre features of novels written in verse and how each part helps build and develop the central message. This unit also focused on point of view. Students will begin to notice the point of view in which a story is told and compare that with their own point of view.

     This is an active learning activity related to action verbs.  This activity will get your student moving while learning about action verbs.  The students will use action verbs to get the class galloping, running, skipping, hopping, etc.  Students will also demonstrate how to use these action verbs in complete sentences. 

Students will write on a predetermined topic. , the students will need some words to help build sentences. The beach ball will have words or phrases written on it that will help the students such as:  I love my pet___________(cat, dog, fish, etc. ) I like to play _______________(game) _ with my pet.  I feed my pet__ _____________. 

This video is part of the Learn and Grow with WHRO TV series. Watch Mrs. Diehl teach about the -ad and -ag word families.

Students will examine and discuss six works of art depicting various elements from the African American historical experience and will follow up with a short essay about their experience with the art. 

This source aims to help students place Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry in conversation with other poems and reading materials, and in doing so, the goal is to help students work on synthesizing sources. The paired passage assignments are designed to offer students and teachers flexibility in accomplishing these tasks. The source is a remix. The original lesson can be found here: https://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plans/gate-4-naomi-shihab-nye

This is a cross-curricular activity that uses the story Alexander, Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday to practice money and decimal skills in addition to reading and writing skills. After reading or hearing the story, students will complete the attached worksheet. (If it's read aloud, students would need a way to refer back to the story to answer the questions. The worksheet has a mixture of reading and math questions. It can be edited if you choose. It can be used for either 3rd or 4th grade. With slight modifications, it could also be used for middle school EL students to learn about currency.  

This guided reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone” (1829) focuses on developing student understanding of imagery and other figurative language, strengthening reading comprehension, and strengthening expository and persuasive writing skills.

In this unit students continue the exploration of factors that influence change by examining the events that led up to the American Revolution. Over the course of the unit, students will build a deeper understanding of the significant ideas and values at the heart of the American Revolution, what drove the colonists to seek independence, and how conflict between England and the colonists ultimately influenced change in our country. Students will see the American Revolution from multiple perspectives, starting with analyzing the difference in perspectives between the British and the colonists and how each side's actions often instigated each other. Students will also explore how class structure influenced colonists perspectives. Later in the unit, students will think about the perspectives of black people, women and Native Americans who were forced to choose a side and why they may have had a different point of view of the events of the revolution.

An important part of this unit is pushing students to focus on seeing history from multiple different perspectives. The core text Liberty! How the Revolutionary War Began offers one perspective on events, however, the prespective is limited to that held by white elite colonists. Therefore, students also read excerpts from A Young People's History of the United States in order to build a deeper understanding of all sides of the Revolution.

This is a follow-up lesson after the students understand a complete sentence and its parts (subject and predicate). Students will add missing subjects or predicates to make complete sentences. Students will begin the sentences with capital letters and end them with punctuation marks. This mini-lesson follows the "I DO, WE DO, YOU DO" approach.