An online interactive activity encourages young readers to employ the monitoring/repairing strategy to become better readers. Class members identify unfamiliar words, decode them, and use them in other contexts.

Model for your class how to become a better reader through questioning. After conducting a picture walk that introduces prediction strategies, learners play an interactive questioning cube game. Complete directions for the game and...

Introduce young readers to the comprehension strategy of visualizing by asking them to think about a place that makes them happy. After illustrating or using words to describe this place, the class moves on to an interactive game using...

This lesson enables young scholars to gain a broader awareness of the basic blues scale and the harmonic structure of the standard blues progression. Students will be given introductory exercises on blues improvisation and will also...

This instructional activity focuses on how the blues both operates as poetry and informs the poetry of many prominent African American poets. Students consider the poetic devices and recurring themes in blues lyrics and the significance...

In this activity students will learn about finding the blues in a variety of musical styles. They will investigate instances of the blues form heard in mainstream pop music, along with exploring the musical styles of two new artists who...

This lesson examines both the content and form of lyrics in blues songs. In addition to highlighting the basic musical form of a blues song, it also addresses the use of floating verses in blues music, both within the context of the...

This lesson enables students to explore and measure the distance between blacks and whites in the past and present United States. By thinking about the intersections of whites, blacks, and others around the blues, students will deepen...

Click here to download a PDF of this lesson. (2.8 MB) Overview This lesson will enable teachers to use the blues to explore selected topics in African American folklore. Students will learn about some of the African American cultural...

This lesson shows how the blues can be used to enable students to explore gender divisions in the United States, both in the past and the present. Most blues songs are about the relationships between men and women, as are many songs in...

This lesson enables teachers to use blues styles and performers to think about various geographical regions of the United States. By studying different blues styles from the Mississippi Delta, Texas, and the Piedmont region of the...

Students demonstrate writing lyrics for a twelve-bar blues pattern by writing two verses of a blues song and then recording themselves singing over a stock blues pattern using Apple's Garage Band. Requires a networked keyboard lab.

The crossroads, and the decisions made and entities met there, are a common theme in literature, pushing readers to examine the choices and encounters that shape life experience. The theme has also been explored in blues music, most...

This lesson plan focuses on how students can learn basic blues percussion patterns by considering the polyrhythms of African drumming and investigating how and why such drums were banned during slavery. Students will listen to several...

This lesson enables teachers to use blues music to explore the history of African Americans in the 20th century. By studying the content of blues songs, students can learn about the experiences and struggles of the working-class...

Students become familiar with the characteristic form and sound of the blues, then learn about the history and evolution of the blues in relationship to the African-American experience. Students examine the structure and language of...

Students practice completing and analyzing Punnett squares. They create Punnet squares in response to a provided scenario from the company Blue Genes Incorporated. In addition, they complete an activity to determine the phenotype of...

An interactive challenges mathematicians to round large numbers with help from a large scale that measures the weight of a blue whale. The practie's five questions include multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, true or false, and an open...

Sixth graders identify and classify changes in their lives. During the second lesson students record observations of Blue Palo Verde seed pods and predict changes over time leading to further investigations.

Model for young readers how to use illustrations, chapter titles, and events in a story to draw inferences and make predictions. Learners then practice these essential comprehension strategies by drawing inferences for another section of...

Who or what is an Australian? Discover a plethora of student-centered, engaging activity ideas on the question of Australian identity, organized according to five major themes: people, symbols, place, sport, and words.

Students sort and compare/contrast the lengths of various whales. They sort pictures of whales in order of smallest to largest, and given a rope marked with the lengths of the whales, they compare the actual lengths of the whales.

Seventh graders determine the amount of blue food coloring in sports drinks and plot the concentration and absorbance data. They summarize the data and determine why companies need to know the amount of chemicals in their products.

Students complete research projects. Students research the achievements of various African Americans and their contributions to the world. They use various resource links on the Internet to become more knowledgeable about the topic.