Allow your students to explore the pros and cons of different strategies used to find the area of rectangles. Use this as a stand alone lesson or as a pre-lesson for the Multiplication and Area in the Community Garden lesson.

In this hands-on lesson, your students will get to sharpen their measuring skills as they measure lengths of items in your classroom to the nearest quarter inch. They'll get to then use their data to create line plots.

Help your students absorb the details of a text and make inferences about what they read with the strategy of close reading. By reading closely, students will become better able to understand complex themes and nuances in a text.