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Although some of the lesson plans are relatively vague, this a pretty solid site overall. There are a number of lesson plans here that could be adapted to fit your specific unit/essential questions. The best thing about these lessons is that the lesson documents (PDFs) contain a wide variety of primary and secondary sources that you can use in a variety of ways. The Zinn Education Project is free to sign up for and use.

"HHMI's BioInteractive is a good place for science teachers to search for science lesson plans, videos, animations, and slideshows to use with students. You can search the BioInteractive library according to topic, keyword, or resource type."

5 minute template based lesson plan

"Set up a surprise, such that resolution of that becomes the lesson that you intended. Anything that makes students ask the question that you plan to answer in the lesson is good, because answering questions that haven't been asked is inherently uninteresting." This article discusses how to create lessons that provoke student interest and prime them for your lesson. We all know that it is important to have a good introduction or a "hook" for a lesson, but this concept goes one step further. A hook that provides too much information leads to waning engagement. The goal is not just to get the student interested, but to make them curious and ask questions that we plan to answer on that day. Although this particular blog post and the examples within are math related, this technique can be implented in any content area.

"When we sit down to try thinking up new ideas, it doesn't feel like we're connecting things. It feels like a strain-like you're trying to create something out of nothing. But the truth is, ideas really do come from connections." Intereresting article that can be applied to the way teachers plan AND the experiences that students have in the classroom.

Lesson objective: In this lesson, students use coordinates to compute perimeters of polygons and areas of triangles and rectangles, e.g., using the distance formula. Pretty much all the steps to this lesson are on the website, which also includes a download link with all the materials that you will need. Something to think about if you plan on completing this lesson: When you first pose the problem to the students - Have the students discuss how they could represent the location of the different vertices for the Bermuda triangle. Give the students time to research/explore and find the latitude/longitude on their own rather than giving it to them directly. There are plenty of tools out there that can help the students complete this task, the most common being Google Earth and Google Maps

This seems like a fun and interesting way to discuss/learn several different math topics. Here's a sample lesson plan that popped into my head when I saw this post: 1. Show to students a GoogleMap/GoogleEarth image similar to the one on the website, but more meaningful to you/them. For example, several different grocery stores around your house. 2. Ask the students, "Which one should I go to?" Have the students justify their answers using the image and mathematical topics that they have learned up to this point. 3. With appropriate questioning you could work in several mathematical topics here (I know I'm missing others as well…) a. Overlay a grid on the GoogleMaps and have the students give each of the locations points on an x,y axis. Use this information to determine distance. Have a conversation if this is the best way to determine which location is easiest to access. When students start to bring up the fact that even though some points are technically closer, but could be slower to get to, bring in… b. Rates, ratios, etc. Discuss how fast you could possibly travel on each route according to number of stop signs, streetlights, speed limit etc. Have students use this information to calculate the appropriate answer.

"If teachers don't have enough time to ask, answer, reflect on, and revise their thoughts about the questions above, then we shouldn't be filling their time with things other people get paid to do, like writing curriculum, writing fancy-schmancy benchmark tests, looking at data that's not useful on the individual student level, or discussing which minutes of the day the bathrooms will be open to students." So many things going on in this article...Personally, I found this statement to be the main standout. I agree with this completely - instruction comes first and all the rest is secondary. If you do a great job with instruction, many of the other time eaters/wasters should fall into place and take care of themselves naturally.

"The best long-term strategy I can see for continuously getting better is for the process of improving to be fun. If I want to get better at teaching, it's got to be fun for me to do so, because that's the only way for me to stare down the abyss of my current craptitude and the probability of my own immediate failure. That's going to look different for different people, because we've all got different tastes. I enjoy planning lessons, so I spend a lot of time on that. You like giving feedback, so you spend your time on that and you get great at that. I hate it, so I suck at feedback and am decent at curriculum." Agree completely with this statement. I think this holds true for our students too. The best long term strategy for improvement in school is that kids needs to have fun in the process.

Digital History is a database of primary sources from America's past. The website contains images, videos, and written word that are easily searchable by era. In addition, there are pre-made lesson plans and activities that could be used or modified in order to meet your specific instructional goals.

"Are you an aspiring rap lyricist? Have I got the tool for you! RapPad is a site where you can compose your raps with the help of rhyme lookups, syllable counters, and a library of beats. It also puts you in touch with a community for discussion, feedback, and online rap battles. But even if you're not planning on writing raps, it offers a unique kind of linguistic fun. With the "Generate Line" feature, you can give RapPad a line, and it will write the next line for you by pulling from a library of successful rap songs. I entered a bunch of famous first lines from literature, and got RapPad to give me back some gems. Are they literature? Are they rap? Let's call it raperature. Or maybe literatrap? Anyway, here are 18 literary first lines paired with rap lyrics." I don't know what the lesson is exactly, but there's some sort of lesson on creativity, writing, vocabulary, etc. waiting to be created here...

Variety of applications for perimeter, area, measurement, etc.