Currently, poetry is something we teach "if there is time" at the end of the year. I would love to make poetry a more integral part of the 1st grade curriculum. Poetry is currently taught by the students reading a preprinted packet of poetry and the students knowing that they are poems.  It's a very archaic way of teaching it, and I would love to change that.

The students are introduced to poetry throughout our curriculum (Scott Foresman Reading Street) through songs and curriculum poems, but are never specifically taught what makes a poem. This blended unit will change that! This unit will fall at the end of the 1st grade school year.

Created By: Katharine Valz

This seminar addresses the inherent challenges of translating poetry from different languages, cultures and eras. Students do some translation of their own, though accommodations are made if a student lacks even a basic knowledge of any foreign language.

Poets achieve popular acclaim only when they express clear and widely shared emotions with a forceful, distinctive, and memorable voice. But what is meant by voice in poetry, and what qualities have made the voice of Langston Hughes a favorite for so many people?

Every society needs a set of rules by which to operate. After the colonies declared independence from Great Britain, they had to write their own constitutions. Impassioned with the republican spirit of the Revolution, political leaders pointed their ideals toward crafting "enlightened" documents. The result was thirteen republican laboratories, each experimenting with new ways of realizing the goals of the Revolution. In addition, representatives from all the colonies worked together to craft the Articles of Confederation, which itself provided the nascent nation with invaluable experience.

The following poster analysis worksheet was designed and developed by the Education Staff of the National Archives and Records Administration. You may find this worksheet useful as you introduce students to posters as sources of historical, social and cultural information.

This site provides a standards-based lesson on how the use of posters during WWII helped win over the hearts and minds of the American people.

This lesson provides students with the opportunity to continue practicing click restraint, a strategy that involves resisting the urge to immediately click on a result and instead scanning the page to make a more informed choice about where to click first. In this lesson, students learn how to analyze the search engine results page in order to make hypotheses about the kinds of sources and information generated in response to the search terms.

This lesson serves as an extension to the Click Restraint lesson. We suggest you teach that lesson before this one.

Migration normally happens out of necessity: work, natural resources, or safety for one’s life. The desire to migrate may be a solution for many but there are barriers that can prohibit the need for safety and prosperity. A large number of students’ families are renting or experiencing homelessness in many parts of the United States. They are entering secondary education ready to get jobs to help their families to gain or just maintain a stable home. Students are also preparing for their small individual migrations from their current schooling location and/or homes to a place of post-secondary education or occupation.

Students will design an effective presentation on which to share key information regarding a given topic or subject. Care will be taken to ensure that the presentation is visually appealing and contains a variety of images, graphics, and text.

This unit asks students to consider civil rights inside the prison as they conduct a mock trial. By participating in a mock trial, students will not only learn about the litigation process, but will also learn about how democratic values and principles can be applied to specific situations, why people disagree on when and how they should be applied, and how the courts are important in providing a forum for contestation and resolution of such disputes and in ensuring that our commonly held values and principles are protected.

This Unit contains 6 lessons:
Lesson 1: What is this case about?
Lesson 2: Understanding the Evidence
Lesson 3: Developing an Outline for the Case
Lesson 4: Preparing for Trial
Lesson 5: The Trial
Lesson 6: Debrief and Reflection

Who makes decisions about the environment? How do decisions about environmental issues affect a community’s health? Who is an activist? How do individuals inform and/or advocate for their communities?

Students will first investigate the global problem of plastics pollution. Through an exploration of maps and data, including from the Pulitzer Center Resource Plastic that Travels 8,000 Miles: The Global Crisis in Recycling, students will gain knowledge of issues pertaining to plastics, both on land and in our oceans. They will utilize the Pulitzer Center resource Joane: We Can End the Toxic Use and Burning of Plastics as one example of a clear community action taken by young people to help bring about awareness and change in their community. Through reading the article and watching the related video, students will identify character traits of Joane, the featured activist, as well as discuss the process of engaging in a civic action.

Next, students will examine environmental issues in communities across Chicago, engaging with locally-relevant themes such as the effects of lead in water and soil, microplastics, and air pollution. They will define the terms environmental justice and environmental racism and discuss how those ideas relate to issues locally and globally. During this part of the unit, students will continue to identify traits that exemplify activism in the leaders highlighted in the articles, as well as determine what traits they may share with activists.

Finally, students will create an infographic or other call-to-action highlighting an environmental issue of their choosing.

Your list is now clean enough that you can begin analyzing its contents in meaningful ways. Counting the frequency of specific words in the list can provide illustrative data. Python has an easy way to count frequencies, but it requires the use of a new type of variable: the dictionary. Before you begin working with a dictionary, consider the processes used to calculate frequencies in a list.

This wiki page documents the Projection Investigation Activity done during San Francisco Unified School District's SLANT workshop on January 29, 2011. Projection information, Julia Marshall's 5 Ways to Integrate, and links are provided, as well as the introductory Improv Activity "Advertising Team" which stretches the imagination to design something for the future. The Projection Investigation Activity begins with research around a scientific theme, then brainstorming and prototyping design ideas around that theme, and finally writing a narrative to present the prototype.

This unit is designed to accompany the study of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Resources encourage students to recognize a variety of propaganda techniques and to connect those techniques to media that they can find in their everyday lives. Resources also help students to understand the historical uses of propaganda by governments and political parties to influence public opinion. Resources can be used independently of the novel.

Examine the seven forms of propaganda found in advertising and politics. Discover the persuasive methods behind the messaging we see every day and gain skills to effectively identify and counter them. A classroom gallery walk challenges students to detect the propaganda techniques at work and evaluate their effectiveness.

Students write an essay expressing their opinion, wherein they choose an influential person and explain why this person should be included within a list of most influential people of all time. In order to ensure that students are respecting the rights of others, they will use an online tool for generating citations to cite sources within a bibliography.

Grade 2: Module 4 of the EL Education K-8 Language Arts Curriculum. In this module, students build their literacy and social-emotional skills through the analysis of literary and informational texts, as they engage in a study of how to care for and conserve the world of pollinators. For more information on getting started with the curriculum, please visit https://curriculum.eleducation.org.

To access this resource, you will need to create a free account for the system on which it resides. This partner uses such data for funding requests to keep their resource growing and up-to-date. Also, these resources are openly-licensed for editing and re-sharing, EXCEPT for certain copyright-protected content (authentic texts, photographs, etc.) within the materials that are from outside sources. This outside content may not be reproduced or distributed (outside the scope of fair use or the EL Education Curriculum Terms of Use) without additional permissions from the content owner.

First grade students will be immersed in three different public service announcements. This immersion will help them understand the characteristics of a PSA. After a discussion, the students will create one on either internet safety or being a good digital citizen.

Students will use Google Slides to publish a writing piece with a partner by collaboratively typing their story, adding images to their slides, and creating links for readers to navigate their published book. This activity may take more than one class period.

Students will use Google Slides to publish a writing piece by typing their story, adding images to their slides, and creating links for readers to navigate their published book.