Classroom Resources

The process of how a bill becomes a law can be pretty complex. As if just getting through committee isn't difficult enough, bills have to navigate a series of amendments and votes in both houses, potentially more committees, further compromise bills, and even more floor votes, just to end up on the chopping block of the President. The President can stop a bill in its tracks with a veto, but a presidential veto isn't necessarily the end of a bill's life.

John Green investigates the dawn of human civilization. John looks into how people gave up hunting and gathering to become agriculturalists and how that change has influenced the world we live in today. Also, there are some jokes about cheeseburgers.

**Sensitive: This resource contains material that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether this resource is suitable for their class.

This free online site offers a variety of online French grammar games that can be used to review grammar concepts at all levels of instruction. An organized guide provides a well-organized list of grammar topics. Topics include Nouns, Adjectives, Adverbs, Pronouns, Possessives, Demonstratives, Indefinites, Prepositions, Verb Conjugations (Present, Past, Future, Conditional, Subjunctive, Imperatives, Participles & Gerunds), Questions, Negations, Comparisons, Conjunctions, Passive Voice, Expressing Time, and more. As an added bonus, most topics include a printable resource or study guide explaining each specific grammar topic. This PDF file is available in both French and English.

Liquids are everywhere, but at the same time, they possess some incredibly unique qualities when compared to the rest of the matter in the universe. In this episode of Crash Course Chemistry, Hank gives you information on things like London dispersion forces, hydrogen bonds, cohesion, adhesion, viscosity, capillary action, surface tension, and why liquids are just weird.

Discover how calculating median and mean reveal different ways to describe a center of distribution in this 9-minute video from the Against All Odds statistics series. This video resource will examine differences in comparable wages for men and women to see practical applications of statistics and data visualization.

In the mid-1800s, Scottish physicist James Maxwell thought something interesting was going on with electric fields, so he decided to assemble a set of equations that held true for all electromagnetic interactions. In this episode of Crash Course Physics, Dr. Shini talks to us about Maxwell's Equations and how important they are to our understanding of Physics. She discusses the ray model, reflection and refraction, ray diagrams, and converging and diverging lenses. 

Understanding collisions and how they are not, all the same, is a big part of physics. In this video, Dr. Shini discussed mass, momentum, and how many other things dictate how collisions can be unique.

In this lesson, students explore how scientists classify living organisms, then gather information about five of the main categories of microbes: bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa, and algae, and contrast the term microbes with systems of scientific classification to show how it is distinct and that microbes are found across the tree of life.

In this Desmos activity, students practice what they have learned about solving systems of linear equations. The activity begins with a review of the graphical meaning of a solution to a system. Later, students consider which algebraic method is most efficient for solving a given system. Finally, students practice solving equations using substitution and elimination. Prior to beginning this activity, students should have experience solving systems of linear equations graphically and algebraically. This Desmos activity offers sample student responses and a teacher guide.

This is a PowerPoint presentation focusing on physical fitness components. By the end of the PowerPoint, students should be able to list five main fitness components and have a brief understanding of each component. 

Financial inequality has been in the news a lot recently. It was the rallying cry for the Occupy Wall Street movement that began back in 2011, and it was at the center of Bernie Sanders’ campaign when he ran for president. This inequality creates what is typically called a social status ladder, with rich people at the top and poorer people toward the bottom. Research shows that your position on the ladder is actually one of the most powerful predictors of health. But it’s so much more than just how much money you have or how fancy your education is. It’s how you feel you compare to other people -- your subjective social status.

In this interactive game from iCivics, students will learn how to win power for state or federal government as they coach a team of players to develop persuasive arguments toward their side. Weaker arguments will make a player fall or even move the power toward the other side. This game can be played during a lesson on powers of state and local governments for reinforcement or after as an assessment. It can be played in a whole group or individually.

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Often files are way too large to be easily stored on hard drives or transferred over the Internet - the solution, unsurprisingly, is to make them smaller. Today, we’re going to talk about lossless compression, which will give you the exact same thing when reassembled, as well as lossy compression, which uses the limitations of human perception to remove less important data. From listening to music and sharing photos, to talking on the phone and even streaming this video right now the ways we use the Internet and our computing devices just wouldn’t be possible without the help of compression.

As computers play an increasing role in our daily lives there has been a growing demand for voice user interfaces, but speech is also terribly complicated. Vocabularies are diverse, sentence structures can often dictate the meaning of certain words, and computers also have to deal with accents, mispronunciations, and many common linguistic faux pas.

We all know how easy it is to spend hours watching videos on YouTube. Why do we go down that rabbit hole? Mostly because of a combination of computer programming and marketing know-how called ALGORITHMS. This video comes with a facilitator guide and student handout that helps guide the discussion of this activity.

A nautically-themed infographic with an accompanying video helps students understand how to tailor the search process to the complexity of the question; then students put their new search strategies to work.

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This resource is information provided by Jaramy Connors from WhoisHostingThis.com. He says, "With so much content and so little oversite, determining which information is reliable can be a daunting task. But failing to do so could leave you looking foolish or worse. Thankfully, there are some easy steps you can take to evaluate the credibility of a website." The resource provides information, a graphic, and other resources to help educate students on evaluate the accessibility and validity of health information online.

This alignment results from the ALEX Health/PE COS Resource Alignment Summit.

It's not hard to find drugs and sometimes it may seem like everyone's doing them — or wanting you to do them. But as with anything that seems too good to be true, there are downsides (and dangers) to taking drugs.

This resource provides information about:

• How Drugs Work
• Commonly Used and Abused Drugs
• Getting Help

This alignment results from the ALEX Health/PE COS Resource Alignment Summit.

Examine the growing debate over childhood vaccines in this video excerpt from FRONTLINE: The Vaccine War. Vaccines have been touted as one of the most successful advances of modern medicine, yet an increasing number of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children because of possible side effects. Learn about the debate among public health officials, doctors, and parents around vaccine safety, and hear differing perspectives on the benefits and risks of childhood vaccination, in this video segment from FRONTLINE.

This alignment results from the ALEX Health/PE COS Resource Alignment Summit.

This free resource from KidsHealth is informational material that can be used to teach students about eating disorders. Eating disorders are problems with the way people eat. They can harm a person's health, emotions, and relationships. There are several types of eating disorders.

This resource covers eating disorders, types, health and emotional implications, causes, diagnosis, treatment, and where to go for help.

This alignment results from the ALEX Health/PE COS Resource Alignment Summit.

Huck Finn's moral journey parallels Mark Twain's questions about slavery.  Like the photographers of the nineteenth-century, Twain, a Realist, struggled with how best to portray fictionalized characters, while still expressing truth and creating social commentary.  In this lesson, students use a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast Mark Twain's novel and excerpts from Frederick Douglass' narrative to original photographs of slaves from the late-nineteenth century.  Then they write an essay to compare the different portrayals, arguing to what extent art can reliably reflect truth.  In addition, they will discuss art as social commentary.

To conclude their study of big data and cryptography, students will complete a small research project related to a dilemma presented by Big Data or Cybersecurity, in the form of a Practice Performance Task. Students will pick one of two issues to research more deeply - either an issue related to big data, or one related to cybersecurity. Students will need to identify appropriate online resources to learn about the functionality, context, and impact of the technological innovation that gave rise to the dilemma they are investigating. After completing their research, students will present their findings both in a written summary and with an audio/visual artifact they found online. The written components students must complete are similar to those students will see in the AP Performance Tasks.

This project is an opportunity to practice many of the skills students will use when completing the Explore Performance Task on the AP® Exam at the end of the year. While an open-ended research project might be intimidating, students have built all the skills they need to complete this task.

Note: This is NOT the official AP® Performance Task that will be submitted as part of the Advanced Placement exam; it is a practice activity intended to prepare students for some portions of their individual performance at a later time.

Students will be able to:
- identify reliable and authoritative sources of information about computing information.
- synthesize information taken from multiple online sources to create a cohesive description of a computing innovation.
- identify an artifact that clarifies an aspect of a computing topic not easily captured in writing.
- explain both the beneficial and harmful effects related to a modern social dilemma in computing.

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This interactive game from WNET Thirteen, “For Crown or Colony?” puts players in the shoes of Nat Wheeler, a printer’s apprentice in 1770 Boston. Players encounter both Patriots and Loyalists, and when rising tensions result in the Boston Massacre, they must choose where their loyalties lie.  A brand-new version of this game is now available! Teachers will need to register to play this game.  The game can be played in a whole group setting or individually.  Teachers can also download a teacher's guide.

This collection of photographs illustrates the westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. The images tell the story of the impact of closing the frontier on American Indians' way of life. Be sure to click "Read More" at the top of the collection to view the lesson that can be used with this collection.

This YouTube video will help explain how to teach factoring quadratic polynomials using a worksheet from Kuta Software. Kuta Software is free software for math teachers that creates worksheets in a matter of minutes. There are a series of three videos available to fully teach this concept. The videos are labeled Factoring Quadratic Polynomials Easy Part 1, Factoring Quadratic Polynomials Easy Part 2, and Factoring Quadratic Polynomials Easy Part 3. This video can be played as a continuation of a lesson on factoring quadratic polynomials. This video is 9 minutes and 24 seconds in length and can be assigned through Google Classroom.

Can you guess why films are called "movies"? Why people are called "actors"? Not only do people move and act in films, but so can drawings! Learn (and try!) how animation makes the inanimate move! Students will read about and watch examples of animation. They will create a flipbook to create a stop-motion animation.  

How do pilots fly a plane when the autopilot isn't working? How do they quickly make the calculations necessary to stay on course and arrive safely at their destinations? By using linearization, a pilot turns a difficult calculation into a simple one and corrects his flight path.

This informational material will apply a mathematical modeling concept--linearization of a non-linear function--to the real-world problem of pilots creating flight paths. There is a video and links to additional information included.

This informational material will introduce negations and explain how to represent these logical statements with symbols in truth tables. It will introduce the term tautology and explain how a truth table can demonstrate a tautology. Practice questions with a PDF answer key are provided. In addition, there is a self-checking online practice tool.

In this intermediate mid to intermediate high Spanish lesson, students focus on persuasive and formal speaking to apply for a job. Students start by examining examples of employment applications from Argentina and the United States. Students then watch a target language tutorial that teaches them how to make themselves stand out among other applicants by using a strategy known as an elevator pitch. Students then work to prepare pitches of their own and interview each other using the provided interview questions. This formal, interpersonal conversation allows upper level students to simulate conversations that would take place in the real world.

The Mind Matters series is a valued resource for tens of thousands of teachers. Each booklet is devoted to a specific drug or drug group. Hard copies of the booklets in English can be ordered for free, and both English and Spanish booklets are available online as printable PDFs. The accompanying Teacher’s Guide, which includes background information and activities to enhance students’ learning, is available online in a printable PDF format.

ACE Fit offers a number of free tools and calculators to help you determine everything from your body mass index (BMI) to your target heart rate zone, your blood pressure, body fat composition, daily caloric needs, and more. Each of those tools will help you find an exercise program that fits your individual needs and goals, whether that be losing weight or increasing your strength with weight training.

This intermediate mid to intermediate-high Spanish activity introduces students to multicultural fashion as well as the controversies that have evolved as designers incorporate indigenous designs into their work. Students start by reading a target language article and answering a series of comprehension questions to check their comprehension. Students then weigh in on the presented controversy by sharing their ideas to provided discussion questions. Students then compare this presented situation to other similar situations within their own culture in which large corporations have taken advantage of indigenous cultures.

This printable resource is a ready-to-use unlabeled map of Latin American countries. It is a perfect resource for novice low students to use as they label countries and capitals, a common first step toward learning to identify the locations around the world that speak Spanish. A copy of this resource that is labeled with each country's name is posted in the comment box below. Additionally, another map that includes Spain and Equitorial Guinea is posted in the comment box.

This unit starts with a video introducing students to life in Pompeii. (This video is about 50 minutes long, it may be useful to show select scenes rather than the entire video). Students are then asked to read and translate 2 eyewitness accounts in which Pliny describes what happened the day of the eruption. Public domain versions of these letters are linked within the activity. Afterward, students are asked to examine the ruins using a video tour of the Forum Baths. To end the lesson, a variety of virtual field trip links are provided allowing student groups to each explore a different aspect of life in Pompeii.

This resource includes many training videos for officiating football. These videos are in both slow motion and regualar speed to allow the watcher to recognize what rules are being observed.