Students will review haiku poetry and compose a haiku poem. They will demonstrate four watercolor techniques--wet on wet, alcohol, salt, and plastic wrap. They will choose which technique to use for their scroll. They will write their haiku on the completed scroll.
Students will be able to interpret the mood of a piece of art by describing the setting of the piece and the colors used within.
This activity was created as a result of the Arts COS Resource Development Summit.
The purpose of this “After” activity is to assess students' ability to manipulate phonemes through an activity called chaining. This activity supports students in building their articulation and distinguishing between the initial, medial, and final sounds in words. Chaining allows students to warm up their brains and practice hearing, seeing, and moving letters around to recognize patterns and repetition in language that will support their phonological and phonemic awareness. Using this as an assessment tool is a great way to identify students that have not fully mastered substitutions, deletions, and additions.
This resource was created in partnership with Dothan City Schools.
Students will watch a video clip with a Native American storyteller telling a traditional story. Students will use supporting evidence from the story to give meaning to oral and written texts. Students listen to a Native American folktale and later give meaning to oral and written texts using supporting evidence from the story. When learners can interpret the meanings of phrases by using supporting evidence in a text, they are using contextual clues. These learners clearly comprehend the explicit and implied information that is available in the text.
The lesson will begin by engaging students with a video of a natural landform in Alabama called Neversink Pit. Students will then research the natural and human-made causes and effects of sinkhole formation in Alabama. Lastly, students will create a video PSA to communicate information about sinkhole dangers and methods to protect people and property from sinkhole damage.
This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.
This lesson helps students improve their writing abilities and their attention to details while experiencing a new technology called Descriptive Video. Also known as described programming, Descriptive Video refers to programming with an additional audio track that narrates a film's visual elements. Students watch the opening scene of the standard version of the Disney film The Lion King and write a description of it. They then watch the same opening scene with the descriptions and captions available online at the National Center for Accessible Media. They will write another descriptive summary of this scene. Students share their two writing samples aloud and compare their pre- and post-audio descriptions.
This website contains 5 primary resources students can use to help write an essay on Abraham Lincoln's assassination.
Google Drawings is a tool that allows students to be creative in sharing what they know. Students will use Google Drawings to create a word cloud of words chosen by the teacher. These words will come from sight words and spelling words that follow a phonetic pattern. It is available on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.
This activity was created as a result of the DLCS COS Resource Development Summit.
The teacher will introduce students to syllables in this activity by showing the video What are Syllables? This video will help students decode grade-appropriate multisyllabic words by clapping, tapping, dividing, and reading out the words. Students will use words placed inside an envelope attached to an anchor chart to clap, tap, divide and read out multisyllabic words and syllable divisions with friends. An example anchor chart can be seen here.
This activity can be extended by allowing students to place one hand under their jaw and count out the syllable divisions for each word (as shown in the video.)
This resource was created in partnership with Dothan City Schools.
The lesson will focus on creating a timeline. The teacher and students will work together to collect data from teachers around the school. Using this data, students will work to complete a class timeline and formulate questions to ask others about their completed timeline. This lesson will require four 30-45 minute sessions to complete.
This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit.
In this unit, students explore a variety of resources—texts, images, sounds, photos, and other artifacts—to learn more about the Holocaust. Beginning with journal writings and a picture book to introduce the central issues, the unit focuses on student-centered inquiry. Students explore a range of print and non-print resources through extensive online inquiry activities. Progressing from individual work to a group learning project, the unit culminates in publishing the group's findings in topic-based newspapers.
The lesson includes complete lists of picture books, read-aloud books, reference texts, and online sites and collections that allow teachers to customize the activities to fit the available resources and students' specific research interests.
In this lesson, shared reading, guided reading, and small, cooperative-group instruction are used in the classroom to informally assess students' ability to demonstrate awareness of rhyme or other visual similarities in words. Students practice matching rhyming words using picture cards and apply phonological awareness—hearing rhyme—to analogy-based phonics (i.e., an ability to decode unknown words by identifying words with similar visual structure). Students use online resources to increase phonological awareness through rhyme.
Through this activity, students will take a monologue that they have been working on and select an image that represents the main idea of the monologue. The images will be projected while each student performs to serve as the backdrop for their performance.
This activity was created as a result of the Arts COS Resource Development Summit.
Students will play a vital role as the “assessor” in this final, culminating activity. By going “backward” and not taking the quiz, but instead creating it, students will learn to shift their focus on the main events/major themes/main ideas of the excerpt. By doing this, they can become better assessment-takers, as they have learned the behind-the-scenes work of making an effective assessment - focusing on the most important vocabulary and plot points. Students will create a quiz with the following guidelines in mind:
Using the selected literary text, students will make a quiz that includes Four (4) Multiple Choice questions, Six (6) Fill-in-the-Blank questions, One (1) Long-Answer Question, and Four (4) True/False questions where students have to provide a space for “fixing” the False questions = 15 questions total
This serves as a rich, comprehensive “check-in” for chapters, short reading excerpts, poems, etc. A rubric is included so students can know the guidelines for the assignment before beginning the work. The purpose of this is to finalize the vocabulary “walk,” chapter “trot,” and finally into the quiz-making (assessment) “moonwalk,” because it’s a “backward” way of obtaining a formative assessment of a text.
This learning activity was created as a result of the Struggling Readers Initiative Resource Development Project, in partnership with Dothan City Schools.
The teacher will use a YouTube video to help students understand text features as it will explain each one. After each text feature is explained, the teacher will ask a follow-up question to determine if the students are comprehending the new information. The students will then play a game to interactively identify text features through the game.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
In this lesson, students will work in groups to design a ramp to increase the speed of a ball. The teacher will guide students' work through careful questioning. After creating different ramps, students will record and report their findings to the class.
This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.
This lesson invites students to use their understanding of modern experiences with digital technologies to make active meaning of an older text, such as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, by asking students to create their own modern interpretation of specific events from the drama. Students first brainstorm a list of technologies they use and then imagine what would happen if Romeo and Juliet were set in a modern-day world and that technology was available to the characters. Students work in small groups to create technology profiles for characters in the play, and then discuss their ideas with the class. Next, students select from a variety of projects in which they re-imagine a scene from the play with modern technology incorporated. Finally, students share their projects with the class and discuss why they made the choices of scene and technology that they did.
This brief animated video provides an introduction to the skill of using synonyms.
In this activity, students will research synthetic medicines and their natural counterparts which perform the same functions. After evaluating the pros and cons of each, students will write a persuasive paragraph expressing their opinions about whether to use synthetic or natural medicines.
This resource was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
This WPSU interactive The Detective's Notebook Game is designed to get students to think about what they are reading and to answer questions that require inferencing. In the game, the student has access to an amateur detective's notebook in which several clues or events have been observed. From these clues, some inferences or predictions can be made. The game is part of Blue Ribbon Readers, a collection of games designed to help elementary school students learn to read. This game is best for students in grades 3 - 6)
This resource allows students the opportunity to practice drawing conclusions based on text evidence.
During this learning activity, students will identify phonics skill-specific words in a passage and then get with a partner to read the passage to become more fluent in their reading. This learning activity can be used with any fluency passage that targets a specific skill. The digital resource attached to this activity has free r-controlled vowel passages available, but any skill-specific passage that is grade-level appropriate will work.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
In this activity, students will read The Flag Maker by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, a story about the creation of the first American flag. Students will be able to answer questions based on key details from the story. Students will explore the main character's emotions throughout the story and try to guess what she is feeling.
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 explain how a region's climate can result in severe weather, serve as reinforcement after students have already learned this concept, or be used as an assessment at the conclusion of a lesson. In addition, the conclusion of this text describes design solutions to prevent hurricane-related hazards.
Grimy Gators are popping out of the city sewers! Students will need to remember their subject-verb agreement rules to get rid of them. Students will read the subject at the top of the screen, then click on the verb which agrees with that subject.
This activity is designed to provide students with a closer look at Odysseus's voyage home. Once students have completed the preliminary assignments from the "Odysseus: Masterful Leader or Arrogant Risk taker?" they are prepared to begin reading the actual text. As they read, students will complete Cornell Notes to ensure understanding of the text. Once we have read Part One of the Odyssey, students will complete a One-Pager depicting their understanding of one of the books read and discussed in class.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
This is a game for learning simple English phrases. You look at the image and then click on the words to make a matching sentence. To score points, you have to watch the ball and click the words at the exact moment the ball stops.
The aim of the game is to give students practice and exposure to simple sentences. The meaning conveyed through the images and the use of words to form sentences creates an association between the words and the meaning. To supplement this, audio is also played when the correct words are clicked. It is hoped that listening to the audio can also form an association between the sound of the words with the meaning and text.
This experience was designed to support its title, the acronym C.A.R.E., which stands for Come together, Assess a need, Relate to a need, Empathize!
This interactive, Google Doc will guide students through the problem-solving process as they practice active listening and creativity during the interview (empathy) and design (iteration) stages of Design Thinking to solve a problem being experienced by a peer.
This experience will provide students with the opportunity to practice the use of the 4 C's (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity), which are highly demanded 21st Century skills.
The student(s) can use the interactive guide to document information gathered during a personal interview with a peer, analyze that information and generate a problem statement prior to listing ideas and designing a prototype as a potential solution.
The active engagement in this experience will expose the student(s) to the Alabama Course of Study standards that focus on identifying alternative solutions to problems, designing prototypes, collaborative communication, showing compassion and respect for others, and expressing creativity.
This activity is a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
Offset elements are words or phrases that can be removed from a sentence and not lose any meaning. Sometimes the meaning is needed, and so it is important to not use a comma in these instances.
This resource allows students the opportunity to practice comma placement with introductory elements and direct address.
For this activity, students will read an online article titled "Grammar Cop’s Winning Olympic Facts." They will see rules and information about the correct verbs to use with singular subjects and plural subjects, and also learn how to determine which verbs to use with tricky subjects like indefinite pronouns. They will fill out a guided notes form while reading this article, allowing them to have examples of subject-verb agreement to refer to later.
This learning activity was created as a result of the Alabama Virtual Library (AVL) Resource Development Summit.
Students get to flex their writing muscles as they use a variety of writing genres to create a zine of their own: letter writing, persuasive writing, narrative, acrostic poetry, comic writing, and biography/autobiography. Each student chooses a prominent figure from popular culture as the focus for a multigenre zine and then plans the project using the Facts–Questions–Interpretations method. Students then write in each of the listed genres about their chosen subjects, using a variety of ReadWriteThink.org tools. Finally, students design covers for their projects, and the teacher binds all the printed documents into individual zines.
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 provide information regarding geologic events that happen over a short period of time, 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 includes a StepRead: StepReads are less complex versions of the original article. StepRead1 (SR1) is less complex than the original article, and StepRead2 (SR2) is less complex than SR1. This will allow the teacher to use this learning activity with students of varying ability levels.
The classroom resource provides a teaching video on comparing and contrasting. The video teaches the students to compare similarities and contrast differences. This classroom resource includes worksheets to help with understanding.
In this activity, students will be taught how to recognize figurative language (similes & metaphors) in poems/poetry and give an explanation for the meaning of metaphors and similes used in poems/poetry.
This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.
This resource provides looping videos that demonstrate the writing strokes of each of the lowercase letters, including the proper approach strokes, letter formation, and line placement. The videos can be played during whole or small group instruction to demonstrate the proper approach strokes, letter formation, and line placement, while the teacher observes and provides feedback. These videos could also be used at a center rotation while students independently practice their printed handwriting strokes.
In this introductory activity, students will learn the characteristics of search engines, identify popular search engines, and learn when to use search engines. They will talk to classmates about their own recent internet searches and the types of results they received. This task activates prior knowledge of search engines as students prepare to use search engines for academic research.
