Cluster 1: Conventions of Standard EnglishArchived

Using David Shannon's book Too Many Toys, students will practice writing an opinion paragraph.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will be able to identify and use descriptive words and phrases to write about various types of balls and marbles. Students will be able to work independently as well as in cooperative learning groups to transform "good" sentences into "great" descriptive sentences.

Type: Lesson Plan

This Model Eliciting Activity (MEA) requires students to develop a procedure to determine which month to hold an outdoor party for a celebrity pop star. Students will need to apply their knowledge of weather patterns and severe weather effects to determine which month would most likely have the best weather for the event.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this model eliciting activity, students are asked to help the International Olympic Committee rank prospective host cities for upcoming Summer Olympic Games. Students are provided with data about a list of applicant cities and then must rank the cities and write a proposal to the IOC explaining their rankings. At the end of the MEA, the students will write an opinion piece for the International Olympic Committee that tells their final decision about which city should be the next host of the Summer Olympic Games.

Type: Lesson Plan

Written at a second grade level, in this MEA the students will use problem solving skills, two-digit addition, and knowledge of greater than and less than to rank order carnival games based on provided criteria.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

The focus of this lesson is to devise a plan, and justify it, in order to determine the best features of a water park. Students will use problem-solving skills, data sets presented in a chart, two digit addition and writing skills. Students will also need to check their procedure to determine if it will work when given additional data.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

The focus of this lesson is to devise a plan, and justify it, in order to choose the best class pet. Students will use problem-solving skills, data sets presented in a chart, two and three digit addition, writing skills. Students will complete bar graphs using data from their data set sheets and answer questions about the graphs. Students will also need to check their procedure to determine if it will work when given additional data.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

The focus of this lesson is to devise a plan and justify it in order to choose the best school supply company. Students will use problem-solving skills, data sets presented in a chart, two- and three-digit addition, writing skills, and money skills to determine the best school supply company. Students will also need to check their procedure to determine if it will work when given additional data.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

The focus of this lesson is to devise a plan, and justify it, in order to select the most appealing toy box.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

The client is searching for the best cell phone carrier based on customer satisfaction scores. Students will choose the best cell phone provider based on the 5 categories; Plans, Coverage, Phones and Features, Fees, and Help and Support, utilizing a rating scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best. Students will organize the factors based on the importance of each (to be determined by the group) and create bar graphs for the client to share with his company.

Students may need to consider companies with lower ratings in some areas depending on the order of importance they have placed on the factors, which will be determined by their group.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students use problem solving skills, data sets presented in a chart, two and three digit addition, writing skills and money skills to determine which brand of jelly beans they would like to purchase. The jelly beans differ in taste, quantity, and cost. The students must then check their procedure to determine if it will work when given an additional piece of data.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

The students have been selected by the cafeteria manager to help rank healthy meal options that have been proposed to be added to the school cafeteria. The students will use information about the food and drink included in the meal, total calories, sodium content, calories from saturated fat, and calories from sugar to come up with a procedure for ranking the meal options. Then students will have to use or adapt their original procedures to include two more meal options in the rankings.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Although, chocolate sales in America have continued to grow, due to the increased awareness of childhood obesity, there is major concern about the nutritional value of chocolate candy bars. Chocolate Delight, a chocolate bar company, wants to improve its sales to elementary students by creating a healthy chocolate bar. They have tested 5 new recipes and need to determine which candy bar is best for children. The students will rank the recipes from best to worst based on the following criteria: healthiness, taste, and nut allergies and make a recommendation of the healthiest recipe to Chocolate Delight.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Would you rather ride in a spaceship or on a submarine? This is the question the students will ponder as they write an opinion piece, taking it through the writing process.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will participate in this engaging activity to learn how to write contractions while acting like surgeons.

Type: Lesson Plan

At the start of this lesson, students will review the friendly letter format as the teacher reads I Wanna Iguana and I Wanna New Room by Karen Kaufman Orloff to the students. These books are told in a friendly letter format between the main character and his parents. With teacher modeling and support, students will then generate a topic and practice writing a friendly letter as a class. Next, students will apply the friendly letter format to create a writing piece. Students will receive practice at editing their writing, independently through peer feedback, and in teacher-student mini conferences.

Type: Lesson Plan

Capitalize holidays, product names, and names of places around the world as you hunt for treasure in this interactive tutorial.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

In this activity, students will identify common abbreviations.

Type: Student Center Activity

In this activity, students will identify and sort contractions, synonyms, antonyms, abbreviations, homophones, and homographs.

Type: Student Center Activity

In this activity, students will match words to contractions on a game board.

Type: Student Center Activity

In this activity, students will write corresponding spelling patterns for long vowels in multisyllabic words. As an extension activity, students will write the correct vowel for the schwa sound.

Type: Student Center Activity

In this activity, students will decode and spell words containing vowel diphthongs while playing a board game.

Type: Student Center Activity

In this activity, students will produce words with different spelling patterns while playing a game.

Type: Student Center Activity

In this activity, students will make words using letter cards containing digraphs, silent letter combinations, vowel teams, and vowel diphthongs.

Type: Student Center Activity

In this activity, students will decode and spell words with r-controlled vowel patterns.

Type: Student Center Activity

In this activity, students will identify and write individual words in compound words.

Type: Student Center Activity

In this activity, students will identify contractions by playing a bingo-type game.

Type: Student Center Activity

This teaching idea describes a project where students studied a specific topic about protecting the environment, created collages in the style of children's illustrator, Eric Carle, and wrote a book which includes 23 ways people can help our planet.

Type: Teaching Idea

This text resource is a guide to proper capitalization. A PowerPoint is included.

Type: Text Resource

This page has many worksheets designed to help teach young ESL students. Some work on general language skills; others reinforce particular elements of grammar.

Type: Worksheet