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Learning Activities

This section of the Design Lab houses more than 200 activities strategically selected to support young people in learning key skills. Most of the activities can be used in classrooms across multiple content areas (including math!). The Learning Strategy Buttons and Search Filters will provide you with many different ways to explore the collection, allowing you to quickly identify activities for specific instructional plans.

Lesson Plan Stages

Common Core Instructional Shifts

Content Areas

Learning Strands

Skills

Showing 12 of 218 results:

Heading Guiding Questions

  • Investigation
This activity helps students to use a text feature of many textbooks and other nonfiction texts to aid comprehension. Students identify headings and subheadings, and convert each into a guiding question that...

Highlighting Strategy to Determine Importance

  • Investigation
  • Launching Into New Content
This activity helps students to closely analyze each line of a text, and to distinguish between those points that are central to the main idea and those that are more peripheral. A consideration of author...

Holden Meets Hamlet

  • Investigation
  • Synthesis
Through this fun activity students develop a rich understanding of characters by imagining an interaction between characters from different texts. Variations of this activity include writing a scene from a...

Hotseat

  • Investigation
  • Reflection
  • Synthesis
This activity encourages deep engagement with a text by asking students to take on the role of a character, historical figure, or other entity, and to respond to questions as this alternate persona. It...

Human Timeline

This activity uses physical movement to help students understand and remember the chronology of events.

I Wonder Poem

  • Building Background
  • Launching Into New Content
This activity encourages students to develop their curiosity about a topic by asking authentic questions in the form of a poem. Using the poem “I Wonder” by Jeannie Kirby as a model, students express their own...

Iceberg Diagrams

  • Reflection
  • Synthesis
Typically, there are numerous underlying causes that give rise to a specific event. Often these causes rest “beneath the surface” and can be difficult for students to “see.” The Iceberg teaching strategy can...

Incremental Comprehension

  • Investigation
Through this activity, students focus intently on the craft and meaning of a relatively short piece of text. They read through the text multiple times, each time focusing on a larger unit of language. This...

Inner Voice Calender

  • Investigation
This quick activity, adapted from Cris Tovani’s Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? (2004), allows students to reflect on their learning by engaging in active dialogue with their peers and/or teachers. Students...

Inner Voice Conversation

  • Investigation
As students read, they need to be cognizant of their inner voice—the conversation in their head with the text in their hands—as they read. They also need to recognize the strategies they are using to...

Inquiry Charts

  • Investigation
  • Launching Into New Content
  • Synthesis
In this activity students will examine multiple sources of information for points of consistency and inconsistency. The purpose of this activity is to build critical reading skills. This activity can be...

Interpreting Visual Aids

  • Building Background
  • Investigation
  • Launching Into New Content
This activity is designed to help students to recognize and strategically use the visual aids present in most textbooks and many articles in subjects such as math, science, history, social science, and art...

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