In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools' dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.

Students use balloons to perform several simple experiments to explore static electricity and charge polarization.

Similar to how Charlotte uses her web to communicate, students create webs for short messages. They learn how spiders create their webs, and about the different types of webs they make. With this knowledge, students design and create their own webs and incorporate messages.

The purpose of the task is to connect properties of fractional exponents with ordering of real numbers. One can place the numbers on the number line to emphasize this.

This problem includes a percent increase in one part with a percent decrease in the remaining and asks students to find the overall percent change. The problem may be solved using proportions or by reasoning through the computations or writing a set of equations.

This task presents a real world situation that can be modeled with a linear function best suited for an instructional context.

This task is intended strictly for instructional purposes with the goal of building understandings of linear relationships within a meaningful and, hopefully, somewhat familiar context.

This workshop can be conducted either before playing the Ayiti: The Cost of Life game, as a way to introduce students to the game's issues, or after playing the game, as a way to help them better understand the links between poverty and access to education.

In this task students use different representations to analyze the relationship between two quantities and to solve a real world problem. The situation presented provides a good opportunity to make connections between the information provided by tables, graphs and equations.

Working in engineering project teams, students evaluate sites for the construction of a pyramid. They base their decision on site features as provided by a surveyor's report; distance from the quarry, river and palace; and other factors they deem important to the project based on their team's values and priorities.

This task suggests methods of introducing and continuing choral counting in the classroom.

Teachers (and then students) lead the class in chanting numbers from 1 to 120.

The purpose of this task is for students to find different pairs of numbers that sum to 7.

This task is primarily about volume and surface area, although it also gives students an early look at converting between measurements in scale models and the real objects they correspond to.

Although this task is fairly straightforward, it is worth noticing that it does not explicitly tell students to look for intersection points when they graph the circle and the line. Thus, in addition to assessing whether they can solve the system of equations, it is assessing a simple but important piece of conceptual understanding, namely the correspondence between intersection points of the two graphs and solutions of the system.

Students use the same method as in the activity from lesson 2 of this unit to explore the magnetism due to electric current instead of a permanent magnet. Students use a compass and circuit to trace the magnetic field lines induced by the electric current moving through the wire. Students develop an understanding of the effect of the electrical current on the compass needle through the induced magnetic field and understand the complexity of a three dimensional field system.

This task shows that the three perpendicular bisectors of the sides of a triangle all meet in a point, using the characterization of the perpendicular bisector of a line segment as the set of points equidistant from the two ends of the segment. The point so constructed is called the circumcenter of the triangle.

This site has an amazing variety of tools that students can use to share their learning.
Let your students have voice and choice!
Some of the best choices on this site include

FAKEBOOK - kids can make a mock facebook page ONLINE for a historical figure, or a character in a novel. Etc.

PAC MAN & ARCADE GAMES -transform your quiz into a trivia Pac Man game. The kids have to answer questions to play and if they die they must answer more questions to continue. The kids can make their own trivia games as well. This could be a great final product and you could play it on the smartboard as a class to evaluate it.

FAKE NEWS Headlines - this would be great for an important event in a novel, or current events, or historical info!

QR CODE TREASURE HUNT – no Internet needed. Kids can create these; or you could!

BURGER ESSAY PLANNER -students can plan and organized essays with the provided structure!

Other Options include: timers, turn your text into a Star Wars theme, 3D gallery, fake Twitter, random name picker, etc!

Students use bearing measurements to triangulate and determine objects' locations. Working in teams of two or three, they must put on their investigative hats as they take bearing measurements to specified landmarks in their classroom (or other rooms in the school) from a "mystery location." With the extension activity, students are challenged with creating their own maps of the classroom or other school location and comparing them with their classmates' efforts.