LEARN NC

K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

CEU courses open for enrollment

The Civil Rights Movement in Context
Investigate the precursors to the Civil Rights Movement, its leadership, its opposition, and its legacy, including lesser-studied events of the movement and primary sources.
Take this course: Begins February 2.

From the education reference

service learning
Intentional combination of community service objectives and learning opportunities that benefits both the recipient and provider of the service. Student service learning projects should be structured to link learning tasks to self-reflection so that they enrich learning, strengthen communities, and teach civic responsibility.
discovery learning
Learning that takes place, not through instruction, but through examination, analysis, or experimentation.
cooperative learning
Instructional method in which students work together in small, heterogeneous groups to complete a problem, project, or other instructional goal, while teachers act as guides or facilitators. This method works to reinforce a student’s own learning as well as the learning of his or her fellow group members.
collaborative learning
An umbrella term for the variety of approaches and models in education that involve the shared intellectual efforts by students working in small groups to accomplish a goal or complete a task.
learning contract
An agreement between a teacher and a student regarding how that student will achieve specified learning goals or objectives.
learning disability
A discrepancy between expected achievement and observed achievement, also known as "unexpected underachievement."
Dimensions of Learning model
Model of learning developed by Marzano et al (1988) that links content area knowledge, metacognition, and critical and creative thinking with a taxonomy of thinking skills and thinking processes.
project-based learning
Teaching approach that engages students in sustained, collaborative real-world investigations. Projects are organized around a driving question, and students participate in a variety of tasks that seek to meaningfully address this question.
problem-based learning
Model of instruction in which the teacher poses an authentic problem for student resolution. PBL may be one among many strategies in a classroom or an entire curricular and instructional approach. In the course of problem-solving, students work cooperatively in groups to learn content and skills related to real world problems. The teacher acts as a facilitator to learning.
digital game-based learning
Instructional method that incorporates educational content or learning principles into video games with the goal of engaging learners. Applications of digital game-based learning draw upon the constructivist theory of education.

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Learning styles: An introduction
Students will read about and discuss learning styles. They will take a pencil and paper assessment to investigate their own learning styles, and practice determining the learning style of others with a story telling activity.
Format: lesson plan (grade 6–8 Guidance)
By Pat Nystrom.
Rainbow spelling: A kinesthetic approach to encoding
The following lesson requires the students to spell words containing learned phonemes using a visual and kinesthetic learning approach.
Format: lesson plan (grade 2 English Language Arts)
By Wendy Parton.
Geometry charades
The students will physically act out and demonstrate the meanings of various given geometric terms.
Format: lesson plan (grade 7 Mathematics)
Animal movements
Students will move like the animal they hear described in the music.
Format: lesson plan (grade K Dance Arts Education and Music Education)
By Jo James.
Classroom food web
This lesson is to demonstrate which organisms feed on one another and how food webs are created.
Format: lesson plan (grade 6 Science)
By Kurt Oswald.
Noodles away
This lesson will assist students to see angle relationships and the relationship of parallel lines and transversals. This exercise is good for visual and tactile learners since it is of a concrete nature. Students of all academic levels can enjoy this.
Format: lesson plan (grade 5 Mathematics)
By Melda Bullock.
Teaching phonological awareness to LD students
This lesson is designed to help students understand the part/whole word relationships at the sentence level. It enables students to relate the 44 phonemes of the English language to words in print (reading) better. Although this lesson is written based on first-grade goals and objectives, it is designed for second-grade students who are not reading at a first-grade level. This lesson should be taught only with a small group.
Format: lesson plan (grade 1 English Language Arts)
By Cynthia Bumgarner.
Place value power
This lesson plan incorporates 3 modalities, which will hopefully help students use the ones/units period, the thousands period, and the millions period to compare numbers in a variety of forms.
Format: lesson plan (grade 5 Mathematics)
By Becky Boney.
Itsy, bitsy spider
The learner will use the words of the fingerplay "The Itsy, Bitsy Spider" to create a book.
Format: lesson plan (grade K English Language Arts)
By JanetD White.
Studying simple machines with Rube Goldberg
Using a copy of a Rube Goldberg cartoon, show how the famous cartoonist drew weird and wacky machines to complete a simple task. Students will develop their own Rube Goldberg-type cartoon, using five types of simple machines, to accomplish their selected feat.
Format: lesson plan (grade 7 Science)
By Cynthia Corley.
Human coordinate graph
Students will actively learn how to plot ordered pairs on a coordinate plane. They will also learn how to connect ordered pairs to graph a picture.
Format: lesson plan (grade 3–4 Mathematics)
By Cheryl Sexton.
Open the gate, close the gate
Open the Gate, Close the Gate is a variety of activities to provide practice identifying and discriminating between open and closed figures. The activities are designed to meet varying learning styles, and to move students from the concrete level to the abstract level of learning.
Format: lesson plan (grade 1 Mathematics)
By Mary Deans.
Telling time
Students will demonstrate telling time to the nearest minute kinesthetically. A large clock is made on the floor by using masking tape and index cards. The index cards serve as the numbers and the masking tape serves as the minutes.
Format: lesson plan (grade 3 Mathematics)
By Tracy Gregory.
Piggies
This activity is a fun, interactive lesson that integrates children's literature with math. (A great way to integrate author studies!) This activity allows students to be involved in all 4 learning styles (visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic). I spread this lesson out over two days.
Format: lesson plan (grade 1 Mathematics)
By Stephanie Hatcher.
Meter madness
The students will identify 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 time signatures. They will also identify the down-beat and begin to understand conducting patterns.
Format: lesson plan (grade 6–8 Music Education)
By Alice Barlowe.
Rhythm beginnings
This lesson plan introduces the terms beat, steady beat, and tempo for the first day of rhythm work.
Format: lesson plan (grade 3–4 Music Education)
By Meg Anderson.
Notating a rainy day
Using manipulatives, students will notate a familiar song.
Format: lesson plan (grade 2 Music Education)
By Melissa Vincent.
Job twister: A lesson in career competency
Twister provides an excellent opportunity to discuss shared responsibilities at home/school as well as to demonstrate working together in a "movement" situation. Young children will enjoy the movement involved while learning directional words, such as right, left, etc. This lesson incorporates literature, technology, and motor skills.
Format: lesson plan (grade 1 Social Studies)
By Ann Sumners.
Assertiveness for students
This lesson will introduce middle school students to assertive behavior as a tool for dealing with disagreements or conflicts with others.
Format: lesson plan (grade 6–8 Guidance)
By Nicki Neumann.
Smart money
Students will practice making money trades to equal $.25 kinesthetically and with manipulatives.
Format: lesson plan (grade 2 Mathematics)
By Sherry Griffith.