Alexander Calder foundation teaching guide

The application of engineering principles is explored in the creation of mobiles. As students create their own mobiles, they take into consideration the forces of gravity and convection air currents. They learn how an understanding of balancing forces is important in both art and engineering design.

Socratic Smackdown grew out of a need to support students in developing and practicing discussion skills. During the game, teams of 4-6 students discuss texts and use textual evidence to make connections and ask thought-provoking questions. Students win points whenever they make constructive contributions to the discussion and lose points if they exhibit disrespectful behaviors, such as interrupting their teammates.

These 160 math projects, from schools across the US, provide overviews, activities, assessment rubrics, work product descriptions, and ideas for reflection. 

Graphic explaining how/when to use pictures found online

Graphic showing the types of plagiarism 

Folger Education offers a world of online resources for teachers, from individual teaching modules to curriculum guides to videos.

 A gifted diarist, Sassoon kept a journal for most of his life, and the papers include a run stretching from 1905 to 1959. At the heart of this series are the war diaries, a fascinating resource for the study of the literature of the First World War which enables a fresh analysis of Sassoon's experience of the catastrophic war which influenced him profoundly.

Students will participate in activities designed to explore the themes, characters and volatile moral issues raised in Shakespeare's Macbeth.  Students will explore the themes of power, ambition and the social status of women in the play and in this production set in the 1920's.  By engaging students with text from main characters in the play, students will explore their response to the play's key question:  what is the tragedy of Macbeth?  

A paper published online in the journal Psychological Science last month, however, suggests that longhand may actually hold an advantage when it comes to the most important reason we take notes-that is, to help us remember what we've heard.

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it's not just what we write that matters - but how.

In the fall of 1865, Sidney Andrews, a northern-Illinois-based journalist, set out to take stock of the post-war South, traveling extensively in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia-attending state constitutional conventions and speaking with people from a variety of backgrounds. His scathing assessment gave ammunition to those advocating a more aggressive Northern hand in Reconstruction: he wrote disparagingly of a widespread lack of education and culture, an undemocratic caste system, festering racial tensions, and entrenched anti-Union sentiment.  His reports were published in The Atlantic and elsewhere, and the topic proved to be of such interest to Northern readers that some of his writings were gathered in an 1866 book, The South Since the War.  In the congressional elections that year, advocates of much harsher policies toward the South swept to power, and for the following decade-known as the years of "Radical Reconstruction"-the South would be subjected to firm rules imposed by Congress.

When lee's army-exhausted, starving, and outnumbered-surrendered at Appomattox, the proceedings went remarkably smoothly. Generals Lee and Grant shook hands and signed articles of surrender, Lee gratefully accepted Grant's offer of rations for his troops, and Grant prevented his men from cheering or firing celebratory salutes. "We did not want to exult over their downfall," he later explained. "The war [was] over. The Rebels [were] our countrymen again." But the fall of the Confederacy meant the invalidation, all at once, of all authority in the South, and order inevitably broke down. In the final segment of his seven-part Atlantic series (see "A Rebel's Recollections" for excerpts from his earlier installments), the former rebel soldier George Cary Eggleston described the chaos of the days following surrender, as marauders robbed, looted, and terrorized the countryside, and no police force, justice system, or municipal government had the authority to keep them in check. He was pleasantly surprised to find that the federal army came to the rescue, helping to reestablish order and "protect all quiet citizens."

In "Late Scenes in Richmond," the war reporter Charles Carleton Coffin explained how the Union had come to shift its aims, especially after General Grant took command. Coffin, who has been called the Ernie Pyle of the Civil War, witnessed and wrote about many of the war's key battles and was close friends with Grant. In this excerpt, he recounted a late-night conversation he'd had with Grant about the general's endgame, and chronicled not only the Confederates' chaotic flight from Richmond on April 2, but also President Lincoln's triumphant visit two days later. 

In the years after the war, Lee would be lionized by the defeated Confederates as the embodiment of all they had fought for and lost. Even a Northerner like Gamaliel Bradford Jr.-a prolific Massachusetts-born writer sometimes called "the dean of American biographers"-took up the tradition, venerating Lee for his chivalry and gentility in the popular 1912 biography Lee the American. In a preview published in the August 1911 Atlantic, Bradford paid tribute to Lee's humility and heroism and to his graceful acceptance of defeat.