| Name |
Description |
| Can We Ever Have Too Many Toys? | Using David Shannon's book Too Many Toys, students will practice writing an opinion paragraph. |
| Celebrity Parties Inc. MEA | 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. |
| Choosing a Host City for the Olympic Games | 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. |
| Carnival | 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. |
| Class Pets | 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. |
| Our School Store | 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. |
| The Toy Box Company | 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. |
| Kelly's Jelly | 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. |
| Restaurant Rankings: Which meal would you want to add to your cafeteria menu? | 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. |
| Chocolate Delight | 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. |
| Give Me Your Opinion | 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. |
| Contraction Surgery | Students will participate in this engaging activity to learn how to write contractions while acting like surgeons. |
| Friendly Writing | 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. |
| Name |
Description |
| Vocabulary: Abbreviation Match-Up | In this activity, students will identify common abbreviations. |
| Vocabulary: Spin Sort | In this activity, students will identify and sort contractions, synonyms, antonyms, abbreviations, homophones, and homographs. |
| Vocabulary: Contraction Connection | In this activity, students will match words to contractions on a game board. |
| Advanced Phonics: Double Time | 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. |
| Advanced Phonics: Sound Choice | In this activity, students will decode and spell words containing vowel diphthongs while playing a board game. |
| Advanced Phonics: The Write Word | In this activity, students will produce words with different spelling patterns while playing a game. |
| Advanced Phonics: Word-O-Matic | In this activity, students will make words using letter cards containing digraphs, silent letter combinations, vowel teams, and vowel diphthongs. |
| Advanced Phonics: Star Search | In this activity, students will decode and spell words with r-controlled vowel patterns. |
| Phonics: Word Plus | In this activity, students will identify and write individual words in compound words. |
| Vocabulary: Contraction Bingo! | In this activity, students will identify contractions by playing a bingo-type game. |
