5th - 8th Grade Lesson Plans

The hardest part of writing an essay can be the first few steps. This lesson and accompanying graphic organizers will help students map out their ideas and practice crafting paragraphs. With this support, your writers will be off and running!

Verbs are the only kind of word that have tenses. Some of them are standard and easy to learn, while others are irregular and tricky. This lesson will review verb tense changes that follow the regular pattern and those oddballs that don't.

This is a lesson about the immigration procedures at Ellis Island. Students will learn about the process and creatively write about what it was like for immigrants to pass through Ellis Island.

What’s unique about abbreviations and acronyms? In this lesson, students will learn the mechanics of using abbreviations and acronyms, including how they are similar and different.

Students often understand the basic conventions of writing, but may need support in incorporating these skills into their work. In this lesson, students will review some of the more common capitalization and punctuation errors and apply their editing skills to real writing.

It’s time to make some verb verdicts! In this lesson, your students will decide if present tense verbs have been correctly changed to reflect the past tense. A focal point of this lesson is the use of irregular verbs. The jury is out!

Improve your students' sentence variation with this lesson that teaches them how to use conjunctions to improve the flow of their writing.

Mae Jemison was the first African American female astronaut to enter space! Use this lesson plan to help your students get to know this prominent scientist, and determine what makes her an influencial person.

Help students decode tricky language in the Declaration of Independence with an integrated vocabulary and history lesson. After reviewing vocabulary as a class, students will rewrite the Declaration of Independence in kid-friendly language.

Condense and combine! In this lesson, students will learn how to combine words to form contractions and hyphenated compound words. Spelling becomes easy when it’s just a matter of pairing words up!

In this civics lesson, your students will examine artwork and participate in a carousel activity as they discuss the Constitution of the United States.

If your students are screaming, make sure they are grammatically correct! In this pronoun lesson plan, your students will identify and use a variety of pronouns to replace common and proper nouns.

Teach your students to edit peer writing with a three-step process that will improve their writing skills and overall confidence. In this lesson, students will practice editing short pieces of writing using specific criteria.

Walk your young writers through the letter-writing process, including formatting, drafting, and editing. Use the checklist to ensure that all of the important parts of the letter are included and the details are polished.

Learn to use text formatting tools like capitalization, bold, underline, and italics to give emphasis to your writing.

A deeper comprehension of clauses and conjunctions will help your young writers understand the building blocks of language. Practice with conjunctions will also help them create more complex sentences and correct run-on sentences.

Prepositions are all around us. This teacher-approved lesson plan will help students identify prepositional phrases through a number of engaging reading exercises.

Young readers will love this story-filled reading comprehension lesson. It's packed with engaging exercises designed to help students become better at looking for details and annotating passages of text.

How can you see what your students are thinking while they read? Try reading response letters in your class. Students will practice formatting letters and learn to discuss their thinking about literature in writing.

Help your students flex their vocabulary muscles with this lesson on using context clues. By deciphering the meanings of different nonsense words, young readers will greatly improve their comprehension skills.

What's up with prepositions, anyway? Help your fifth graders get a leg up in grammar. In this preposition lesson plan, students will identify prepositions and use them to write complete sentences.

Have your students heard about participles and tenses? This fun lesson teaches students about conjugating verbs and forming sentences.

Use this lesson to show your students that dreams can become reality with dedication and determination. This lesson will teach them about a man who made his dream come true by standing firm in front of the most challenging obstacles.

Let's learn about natural disasters. After reading through some informational texts, students will use their close reading skills to answer questions about different types of disasters.

Challenge your students to compare two methods for finding the least common multiple between two fractions. Use this lesson on its own or as support for the lesson Make It Work! Adding Fractions with Unlike Denominators.

Up, up, and away! It's Peter Pan vs. Wendy vs. John in this reading comprehension lesson. Using the Peter Pan and Neverland workbook, students will use text excerpts and comprehension questions to write an essay comparing main characters.

Goodbye London, hello Neverland. In this lesson, students will complete the final pages of their Peter Pan and Neverland workbooks by taking a more in-depth look at Peter's full character and what possibilities Neverland might hold.

This lesson will allow students to explore the backgrounds and contributions of the Founding Fathers by completing an online scavenger hunt and writing a basic biography.

Challenge students with a discussion about prepositions and conjunctions in this lesson. Your class will write a journal entry to explain the function of the prepositions and conjunctions in a specific sentence.

Help students understand ethics and how it relates to life in the classroom with this lesson that has them use their own independent reading books to find relevant situations.