Learning Activities

In this activity, students will be introduced to actual historical people who were forced from their homes in Africa, as a part of the slave trade, and brought to Alabama on the ship Clotilda. Students will read a brief informational text and use the content to complete a K-W-L chart, mark the birth and death place of each enslaved person, and formulate questions about the course of the enslaved person’s life.  Students will not be made aware of the enslaved status or the means they traveled to the United States during this activity, but they will begin to recognize, with guidance from the teacher, that Mobile, Alabama, along with other sites, was a center of the slave trade and is home to a port that was a stop on the Triangular Trade routes.

In this learning activity, students will visit a website to gather information about the contributions of ordinary citizens including Nathan Hale, Daniel Taylor, and James Armistead during the American Revolution. These ordinary citizens were part of a unique group called The Culper Spy Ring, who supported the American Revolution by sending secret messages to George Washington about the British Army's plans. After reading about these men and women who risked their lives during the American Revolution, the students will make "invisible ink" and send their own "revolutionary warnings" to each other.

This alignment is a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

Students will understand and explain the security technologies of encryption and public keys and construct a complex system of numbers and/or letters to represent information.

This activity was created as a result of the DLCS COS Resource Development Summit.

Students will view a photograph of the historic marker placed in Mobile to commemorate the arrival of five ships containing enslaved Africans to that location. They will read the information on the marker to understand why it was placed and to gather details about the ships, such as their names, arrival dates, places of origin, number of captives on board, and number of deaths that occurred during the Middle Passage. Students will utilize this information to recognize Mobile as a center of the slave trade. They will collaborate locally to add the dates and a summary of the information to an online digital timeline.

Students will watch a video about personification. Students will identify examples of personification in the video and interpret their meaning. Students will write their own examples of personification using a Google Slideshow provided by the teacher.

This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

This activity is an exploration of mixed numbers, improper fractions, multiplying fractions by a whole number, and adding fractions with unlike denominators. The students will create a digital design using virtual pattern blocks. Counting the hexagon as one whole, the students will multiply the fractional pieces of their design and then use a blank pattern block template to add fractions with unlike denominators and find the total value for the picture.

This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

Students will use critical and creative thinking to generate many, varied, and unusual ideas for a media arts product through synthesis, using personal experience and/or the work of others.

This is the second activity in a series of four to meet Media Arts Standard 5.1:

Using Productive Thinking in Media Arts

Identifying and Choosing a Message in Media Arts

Cracking the Secret Code in Media Arts

Storyboarding in Media Arts

This activity was created as a result of the Arts COS Resource Development Summit.

This learning activity is an engaging teacher-created Google Slides presentation with basic definitions of literary terms illustrated with examples (gifs and videos) featuring a student favorite, Spongebob Squarepants. This activity includes a link to a Quizlet flashcard set.

This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

This learning activity can be used during or after a lesson or unit on the Underground Railroad and/or the Civil War. The Underground Railroad is a “choose your own” learning experience allowing students to make a series of choices that affect their journey along the Underground Railroad. Presented from a first-person perspective, the learning experience immerses students in the action as they escape from a southern plantation and head north toward freedom. Along the route, students make key decisions that will lead them to one of several possible outcomes.

This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

This activity is designed to help students make connections between music and their own lives.  They will use their background knowledge to design movement that expresses their feeling about the song.

This activity is designed to be used following the activity Wild Things: A Song Study.

This activity was created as a result of the Arts COS Resource Development Summit.

Students will look at a picture titled "Portrait of a Flathead Man." They will answer the question, "How does this picture help you understand anything about Native American culture?" This activity will activate students' prior knowledge about American Indians in North America.

This learning activity was created as a result of the ALEX - Alabama Virtual Library (AVL) Resource Development Summit.

In this activity, students will roll a die to fill in the prices of different ingredients for each meal on a menu. They will need to add, subtract, and multiply decimals to answer questions about the meals.

This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

This lesson gives students the opportunity to explore volcanoes and their impact on our planet. Students will take a virtual field trip of a dormant volcano and answer research questions about its formation and its after-effects. Next, students will discover which volcanoes in the United States are currently active. Finally, students will use an interactive map activity to explore famous eruptions from around the world. They will be given clues about the date and consequences of the eruption. Once they locate the volcano, they will place a virtual pin in its location on the world map. This lesson aligns with 6th grade Alabama Science Course of Study.

This activity was created as a result of the DLCS COS Resource Development Summit.

Students will read and view two types of informational texts that address the Triangular Trade. They will take notes to recognize centers of the slave trade and the establishment of the Triangular Trade routes. Students will also analyze the two texts by comparing them for effectiveness.

Students will listen to and locate unknown phrases of similes, metaphors, idioms, and hyperboles in context using holiday songs and stories. They will explain the meanings of common idioms used in holiday songs and stories. They will also use figurative language (similes, metaphors, idioms, and hyperboles) correctly to describe digital holiday images. 

This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

The teacher will talk about the history of Cinco de Mayo (who, what, where, when, why). The teacher will read Marco’s Cinco de Mayo by Lisa Bullard. The teacher will teach the students the Mexican Hat Dance.

This activity was created as a result of the World Languages COS Resource Development Summit.

This Digital Breakout is a perfect way to enhance a unit of study with animal standards for grades 3-5. It can be used before or after a unit of study or a field trip to the Birmingham Zoo. Students will work creatively and collaboratively to solve academic puzzles to unlock an answer. Academic puzzles are centered around a variety of Course of Study standards that engage students through the Breakout process. This activity can be done as a whole group for students that are not familiar with the Digital Breakout process. This activity can be done in small groups in grades 2-5 with students that are familiar with the Digital Breakout process.  

This Learning Activity was created in partnership with the Birmingham Zoo. 

Students will utilize the text of Senate Resolution 315 to pose a question as a class.  They will view a news story about the Africatown Heritage House Museum and use the video to answer the question in a class discussion. The class will formulate additional questions about the news story and conduct an internet search to locate the information to answer those questions using digital sources.

Students will watch a short YouTube video on how to use homographs in text. They will then choose three homographs to use in a short story. Students will use those homographs to write a story and then record their story using Flipgrid. Students will then watch two other students' videos to complete the homograph story evaluation sheet attached. 

This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

Students will be creating a Halloween-themed recipe and then altering it to feed various amounts of "witches". The students will practice both multiplying and dividing fractions.

This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

Students will use an online storyboard program to plan a commercial for a high-interest product, drawing on personal experience and the work of others, that communicates a student-selected message. This message will communicate the identified ideals of the company and will have re-imagined the elements and principles of design from an already existing commercial for that product.

This is the fourth activity in a series of four to meet Media Arts Standard 5.1:

Using Productive Thinking in Media Arts
Identifying and Choosing a Message in Media Arts
Cracking the Code in Media Arts
Storyboarding in Media Arts

This activity was created as a result of the Arts COS Resource Development Summit.

Students will present their Endangered Animal poster (from the learning activity Endangered Animals: Part 2) to the class. While listening to the presentations, they will take notes on two other students' endangered animal poster presentations using the Endangered Animal Presentations Notes. They will then use their notes from the poster presentation to write a three-paragraph informational essay. 

This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit. 

Flipgrid is an online resource that allows students to produce a video recording in response to a particular topic and then share it with teachers and classmates.

This activity gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of metaphor in a personal way. Students will reflect on their personal traits/characteristics, brainstorm an animal, object, etc, that shares similar qualities and write a speech about their chosen metaphor. Then they will perform, record, and share their speeches with the teacher and classmates through the online tool, Flipgrid.

This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

Horrendous Soup is a game in which students have to make a recipe for the most disgusting soup they can imagine. Students progress through the game by adding ingredients to the soup. Some of the ingredients are measured in capacity, some are measured in mass, and some are measured in distance. This is a way to reinforce metric conversion skills. To successfully print out the recipe, students must demonstrate the ability to convert the amounts of ingredients to other metric units. For example, liters to milliliters and vice versa, grams to milligrams and vice versa, and millimeters to centimeters to meters.

This activity results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

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.

This is an instant activity for classes to engage in full body warm up while gearing up for the main lesson for the day. The students will work independently using locomotor skills and various exercises while maintaining personal space. This is a super easy setup and no equipment is needed. The activity card can be displayed on a screen or printed to hang on the wall.

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

Prior to this activity, students should have learned to spell basic words. They’ve also more than likely recently learned various greetings and basic questions. In this activity, they put these skills together using a medium with which they are very familiar. It also enables them to discover that teenagers in other countries also text and use abbreviations. Although this activity is about writing, it is communicative because it takes two people to make it happen.

This activity was created as a result of the World Languages Course of Study Resource Development Summit.

Students will view and manipulate an interactive map that shows documented arrival sites of enslaved persons in the United States. They will locate and identify areas with natural harbors, such as Mobile, New York, Boston, Savannah, etc., that served as arrival sites of slave ships and centers of the slave trade. Students will use a template to identify these natural harbors that served as arrival sites from the Middle Passage.

Students will watch a short video about the elements of plot and identify character, setting, problem, and solution. Then, students will be given cards with text. Students will sort the text cards into the four categories of character, setting, problem, solution. 

This activity results from the ALEX Resource Development Summit.

In this learning activity, students will create their own blues piece using the "Madlib" and perform their blues piece using the 12 Bar Blues pattern on the instruments available.  (This activity can be altered at the discretion of the teacher based on the classroom resources and skill level of the students). Choices can be the use of just the singing voice, barred instruments, guitars, ukuleles, boomwhackers, etc. 

This virtual manipulative can be used to help students visualize the multiplication of two fractions using an area model. This interactive manipulative can help improve students' spatial skills and build conceptual understanding of fraction multiplication. 

This learning activity was created as a result of the Girls Engaged in Math and Science University, GEMS-U Project.

This learning activity is a great way to add high interest to grade 5 standards. It can be used after the study of identifying and plotting points on coordinate planes, relating points and finding distances in a coordinate plane, graphing and interpreting data in a coordinate plane, making and interpreting line graphs, and basic computer skills. This activity can be completed as a partner activity/assessment or an independent activity/assessment.   

This learning activity was created as a result of the Girls Engaged in Math and Science (GEMS) Resource Development Project, in partnership with Dothan City Schools.

This learning activity should be used at the end of a lesson or unit on figurative language. The students will create a menu for a new restaurant using figurative language to describe each menu item. 

This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit. 

This activity is designed to allow students to make connections to their own lives, to help them use background knowledge, and to help them understand that reading comprehension is just as important when singing or playing an instrument as it is when reading a story or text.

This activity was created as a result of the Arts COS Resource Development Summit.

This learning activity is a Google Slides presentation with an embedded video of actor Sean Astin reading A Bad Case of Stripes. Students will practice using academic vocabulary terms to identify plot elements in the picture book and complete a plot diagram.

This activity was created as a result of the ALEX Resource Development Summit.