The annual Elie Wiesel Writing and Visuals Arts Competition is open to students in grades 6 through 12 and serves to inspire middle and high school students and teachers to learn more about the Holocaust, racism, bigotry, and the dangers of prejudice. The questions posed each year guide students to explore the lessons of the Holocaust while examining contemporary issues such as bullying, peer pressure, unthinking obedience to authority, and indifference.

This is a 4 day series of lessons designed to familiarize students with 3D design and computer aided design using Google SketchUp.

For this project, students create a station.. They are assigned a 3D figure (cylinder, cone, prisms, pyramids, sphere, etc). They must create a station that teaches the parts of the figure and how to find the surface area, lateral area, and volume of the figure. Then students visit each station created and have a quiz on all the stations.

For this project, students create a station.. They are assigned a 3D figure (cylinder, cone, prisms, pyramids, sphere, etc). They must create a station that teaches the parts of the figure and how to find the surface area, lateral area, and volume of the figure. Then students visit each station created and have a quiz on all the stations.

Slope Discovery Power Point Activity by C. Hogan
Virginia Department of Education resource titled, "Slope Discovery," which is an activity resource in which the student will determine slope, write the equation in slope-intercept form, and graph a line.

This is an activity that can be used to introduce students to how the ASCII code is used in representing letters in coding.  Students will be given a table of the ASCII code that will be used to decode words and phases.  Then students will create a message in ASCII code and exchange with a fellow student to decyper the code.  An extension of this lesson can be to intoduce students to binary code that represent each digit int he ASCII code.

In this 8 minute video, Paul Andersen describes how life could have formed on our planet through natural processes. The progression from monomers, to polymers, to protocells and finally to cells is described. The Miller-Urey experiment is described in detail as well as characteristics of the latest universal ancestor.

Also included are worksheets, a concept map, a slideshow, and transcript of the video.

Transcript added from YouTube subtitles. You can use this to write your own worksheet or quiz.

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.

Virginia History & Social Science Standards of LearningGrades 9-12Learning Domain: GovernmentStandard:Indicator: The student will explain that thoughtful and effective participation in civic life is characterized by the performance of the duties of responsible citizens. 

This lesson uses a YouTube video to present affirmative tú commands, giving special attention to the 8 irregulars with the help of a mnemonic device.  The student directions and activity are included.

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.  

From Khan Academy- This site teaches High Schoolers how to create equations through a series of 298 questions and interactive activities aligned to 5 Common Core mathematics skills.

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 primary source activity can be used after teaching students about the different groups during the Revolutionary Period such as patriots, loyalists, and neutrals.  The activity is on a Google Worksheet and includes links to primary sources online and questions about those sources. The primary sources include writings by Cato, an American farmer, and Reverand Inglis.   You can add or change questions if you so wish.  The settings can be changed as well by clicking on the settings icon at the top right corner of the screen.

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.

  Students will locate fragments and correct fragments within a written piece of text. 

Students will read, locate, and correct run-on sentences within a written piece of text. In addition to students practicing with isolated written examples of run-on sentences, they also need to find and correct run-ons that are embedded in text. This lesson will allow students to practice this skill.