This activity is used to introduce students to mythology. After this activity, learners will be able to identify and categorize the patterns found in various myths. Students will be able to write arguments to compare and contrast the patterns found in two myths.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
Know when to use verbs in the active voice or the passive voice. The active voice shows the subject acting. The passive voice shows something else acting on the subject. Most writers consider the active voice more colorful and avoid the passive voice unless necessary.
In this learning activity, students complete a Quotation Quick Check to demonstrate their knowledge of punctuation and capitalization and the use of correct mechanics specifically focusing on quotation marks.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
This is a multi-session interactive lesson plan about animal adaptations for kindergarten through second-grade students. The goal of this interactive digital lesson plan is to guide students through activities that help them understand how characteristics such as body covering, body parts, and behaviors help animals survive. These lesson plans also build cooperation and communication skills for students. There are additional resources provided for the teacher to use before or after using the HyperDoc.
This Lesson Plan was created in partnership with the Birmingham Zoo.
Students need to practice all types of writing, and oftentimes argumentative writing is ignored in favor of persuasive writing. In fact, students may not even understand there is a difference between these two types of writing. In this lesson, students examine the differences between argumentative writing and persuasive writing. After choosing topics that interest them, students conduct research which becomes the foundation for their argumentative essays. After completing their essays, students use Piktochart to create infographics to represent their research.
In this video, students learn how special short vowels are. They learn how to write short vowel sounds and what sounds each short vowel makes.
This learning activity should be used as an after activity to help students improve their ability to write and revise their own narrative writing. The students will work in pairs to review a close reading of an excerpt from The Giver. They will use the excerpt to analyze and learn from the choices the writer made. The excerpt is designed to teach students to control their narratives by focusing on a specific scene's point of view, beginning, middle, and end. It also emphasizes the use of imagery, figurative language, dialogue, characterization, setting, and action verbs by exploring the author's use of each of these. Although this learning activity uses an excerpt from The Giver, it could easily be modified to teach any type of narrative writing by giving the students an excerpt of a novel and letting them annotate the excerpt. This learning activity could be paired with any or all of these learning activities found on ALEX - "My Hero's Journey Book Proposal" and "My Hero's Journey Narrative."
This activity is a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit
In this lesson, students complete two prewriting activities, one on brainstorming ideas using story maps, and one on creating the beginnings of stories. They then work on two collaborative-writing activities in which they draft an "oversized" story on chart paper. Before starting the activities, the teacher reads aloud the first few sentences from a variety of children's books that have unusual, exciting, or particularly descriptive openings. Each student works individually to read what has been written before, adds the "next sentence," and passes the developing story on to another student. The story is passed from student to student until the story is complete. In a later lesson Collaborative Stories 2: Revising, the story is revised by the groups.
Before students begin to search Alabama Virtual Library databases for both scholarly and popular sources, students need to know what a database is. In this activity, students will learn the definition of database and the characteristics of this type of search tool. They will also access Alabama Virtual Library to see the variety of databases within this free state resource.
Using One Leaf Rides the Wind by Celeste Davidson Mannis as an introductory text, students learn to identify elements of haiku poetry. Students go on a class hike to observe nature in their own neighborhood and collect "picturesque" words in their writer's notebooks. They explore syllable counts in their word collections and use descriptive words to compose an original haiku. Students then use print and online resources to locate facts for informational notes on the topics of their poems. Finally, students work collaboratively to publish their poetry and notes in an illustrated class book.
The teacher will present an informational text from the website, ReadWorks. Students will interact with this non-fiction text by annotating the text digitally. The students will answer the questions associated with the article as an assessment. This learning activity can provide the background information needed for students to design a solution for cleaning a polluted environment, serve as reinforcement after students have already learned this concept, or be used as an assessment at the conclusion of a lesson.
This is a game for practicing simple vocabulary words in English. You listen to the audio and then click on the correct word or image.
The aim of the game is to practice interacting with English words for simple everyday use. The images used in the game convey meaning and context. Through the interactions, this meaning is paired with text and audio to facilitate learning and reinforcement.
In this learning activity, students will conduct a short research project using digital sources on a topic from a list of possible topics, to answer self-generated questions. Students will then write curiosity questions, research the answers, and cite the sources.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
This lesson explores coordinating conjunctions through a short, fun video and activity. Coordinating conjunctions link two complete thoughts. For, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. A helpful hit: Remember FANBOYS. This resource includes an activity sheet for students to practice using coordinating conjunctions.
This After Activity is designed to come at the end of a class period when all activities have been focused on the same topic: subject-verb agreement. Teachers may use this exit slip as a daily grade and/or a formative assessment to judge the level of students’ understanding of this topic. Students must read the sentence and determine which verb agrees with the subject of the sentence. The student must then create a variety of sentences with tricky subjects such as compound subjects and collective subjects and demonstrate that he or she can make the verb agree with the subject.
This learning activity was created as a result of the Alabama Virtual Library (AVL) Resource Development Summit.
In this lesson, students participate in a Directed Listening-Thinking Activity (DLTA), in which they listen to "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe and answer prediction questions at designated stopping points during the reading. Students then discuss and write a written response to the story at the conclusion of the lesson, in the form of either an acrostic poem or comic strip. This lesson works well at Halloween or at the beginning of a mystery unit.
The teacher will present an informational text from the website, ReadWorks. The students and teacher can interact with this non-fiction text by annotating the text digitally. The students will answer the questions associated with the article as an assessment. This learning activity can be used to introduce students to the growth needs of plants, serve as reinforcement after students have already learned this concept, or be used as an assessment at the conclusion of a lesson. This learning activity will provide important background information before students plan and carry out their own investigation of growing plants.
Trying to determine whether a statement is a fact or opinion just comes down to one thing: Can it be proven? The classroom resource provides an instructional video on facts and opinions. The video teaches the students to identify statements as being either a fact or an opinion. This classroom resource includes worksheets to help with understanding and encourage application.
This learning activity will assess students' understanding of verb tenses and is meant to be utilized after an instructional unit on verbs and verb tenses. In addition, students will be required to demonstrate command of the conventions of Standard English grammar, usage, and spelling when writing.
This resource was created as a part of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
Discover why the crucial factor that can determine whether your next workplace interaction goes well isn’t what you say, but how you listen, in this video from the Career Hacks collection. Host Camille talks with two professionals and learns what not to do in her next interview. She also learns simple things she can do to show respect to anyone she talks with and truly hear what they’re saying. This resource provides instruction and discussion on active listening skills.
In this classroom resource, students will learn how to order adjectives. It is very common to use more than one adjective before a noun in a sentence. Remember, when we use more than one adjective before a noun, we need to put them in the right order, according to their type. This resource offers videos, games, and worksheets to help further understand the concept taught in this lesson.
When tasked with locating information, students usually turn to Google first. In this activity, students will learn strategies for effectively using the Google search engine for answering research questions. They will conduct a Google search in a small group using these search strategies and determine which strategies yield the most useful results.
Validate students' out-of-school language use by asking them to share details on the use of words and phrases from movies, television shows, books, and other texts. In this activity, students compose dictionary entries for words and phrases from pop culture texts, connecting the definitions to their personal use of the terms. Their work is published individually, or if desired, collectively in a class dictionary.
The teacher will present an informational text from the website, ReadWorks. The students and teacher can interact with this non-fiction text by annotating the text digitally. The students will answer the questions associated with the article as an assessment. This learning activity can be used to introduce students to the varying habitats of living things, serve as reinforcement after students have already learned this concept, or be used as an assessment at the conclusion of a lesson. This resource also provides an eBook of the article with corresponding illustrations.
In this classroom resource, students will learn how to distinguish between degrees of adjectives. There are three degrees of comparison - positive degree, comparative degree, and superlative degree. You don't need to know these terms, but you need to know how to use each in a sentence. This resource offers videos, games, and worksheets to help further understand the concept.
This learning activity uses a strategic approach to introduce students to the academic vocabulary they need to understand before writing an expository essay. The activity uses quadrant cards to help extend student learning beyond the basic definition of the term. The following terms are included in the learning activity: transition words, target audience, supporting details, thesis, conclusion paragraph, body paragraph, introductory paragraph, objective tone, formal style, text organization, exposition, and body paragraph.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
In this lesson, students explore adjectives through a short, fun video and activity. Adjectives modify nouns. When using more than one adjective to describe a noun, we need to make sure they are in the correct order—from general to specific.
This resource provides students with the opportunity to practice identifying correctly ordered adjectives.
Students will review the meanings of connotation and denotation. Students will apply knowledge of connotation and denotation to "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke.
This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.
Students will listen to the audio of an interview conducted in May of 2019 with Ben Raines, the journalist primarily responsible for locating the shipwreck of the Clotilda. Students will collaborate in small groups to identify the month and year of the discovery and to write a caption statement for the event on a timeline. The caption will effectively and clearly express the event and will demonstrate students’ command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. The class will look at each of the groups’ written captions and vote using an online tool to select the best caption. The selected caption will be added to an ongoing collaborative timeline started in previous related learning activities of this unit.
The proverb says, “You can't judge a book by its cover.” In this lesson plan, students are not judging what is inside the book, but what is on the cover itself. What does it include? Why? What is left off? Why do you think that is? After examining many book covers and dust jackets, students recreate a cover or dust jacket for a selected book; then, they share their creations with their classmates and explain the changes they made or what they chose to keep. Students use a checklist to make sure they have all of the needed components, and the teacher can use the checklist as an assessment piece.
Beware of squirrels! Experience the science of force and motion while learning that an author’s reason to write is either to inform or entertain the reader. In this interactive lesson, write a motion story and use motion words as you practice reading with a nutty squirrel.
Punctuation marks are the symbols used in writing. They act as traffic signs in writing. They tell us when to stop, slow down, or even when to pay attention to something. They make reading easier and writing better. It's important to be able to recognize punctuation marks and know how each one works. In this classroom resource, the students will learn where to put a period. This resource offers informational material, videos, games, quizzes, and worksheets to help further understand this concept.
In this activity, students will use their knowledge of imagery and point of view to analyze a piece of short fiction and how the author uses those literary devices to convey meaning as a whole.
This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
In this online book from the International Children's Digital Library, a young American Indian describes the natural surroundings and activities of the S'Klallam, or Clallam, people through the seasons of the year. The book includes a glossary of S'Klallam words.
Author—Ron Hirschi. Illustrator—Constance R. Bergum.
The four seasons each hold a different but essential role in the lives of the S'Klallam people of the Pacific Northwest. This book highlights the importance of each season and how it affects the ways the S'Klallam people live their lives.
See the supplemental assets for detailed teaching activities. These materials allow students the opportunity to actively engage with the text.
This lesson increases student knowledge of severe weather and weather forecasting. It emphasizes the importance of student questioning to obtain information. After the introduction to severe weather is made, students will create their own Tornado in a Bottle, and use this exploration to make further connections.
This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.
