Ideas

According to Plato, "Necessity is the mother of invention." As educators, our jobs require that we capture the fickle attentions of a captive audience that may have little to no interest in being in the classroom. To lend assistance to pursuit of quality lesson presentations, below are some lesson plan and unit ideas that you may feel free to take, manipulate, and adapt to suit your classroom needs.

__PowerPoint Presentations (PPPs)__: PPPs are a great way to incorporate visuals and auditory elements into any lesson presentation. With PPPs, you are able to engage in differentiated instruction that will not only capture student attention, but assist them in the improvement of their note-taking abilities. PPPs also allow you to store presenter notes so that you may have the CFUs that you pre-planned right at your fingertips, so you don't need to worry about forgetting integral portions of the lesson presentation.
 * Direct Instruction (any subject)**

__Explaining Anthropomorphism and Personification__: This is a great opportunity for your students to engage in discovery learning through comparison and contrast of different examples and by forming hypotheses about the meaning of the words and later confirming these informed guesses by using their dictionary skills. A great tie-in assignment would be for students to create their own concrete poems.
 * Language Arts**

__Concrete Visual Aids or Artifacts__: Some amount of direct instruction is necessary to set the stage for any learning and nothing captures student attention quite like new and unusual objects being related to the subject at hand. Making such objects as a standard roll of toilet paper relate to 4.5 billion years of geologic time is a great way to not only inspire a student's imagination but can also serve as a means to visually anchor the learning to the learner.
 * Any type of Instruction (any subject)**

__ Newspaper __ : A fun and interesting cooperative project a teacher can assign their students at the secondary level is to have groups construct a newspaper. Inside the paper can include a main article, feature articles, cartoons, social columns, opinion pieces, illustrations, and various other elements that make up a newspaper. The newspaper can be formatted in a variety of ways; it could resemble the time period the project is about. All of the elements of the newspaper will focus on and provide information about the topic being discussed in the class. Not only will the assignments call for outside research, but also for creativity. Different tasks can be assigned to each group member. The tasks can vary as needed so that ultimately a student can choose one that is similar to their academic interests and meets their individual learning style. In the end, each group can present their completed newspaper to the class where the teacher and potentially the fellow students can evaluate the work; student evaluation being turned in anonymously.
 * Cooperative Learning Assignment**

__ Choose a Final Project __ : At the end of a unit, semester, or year a teacher will undoubtedly want to assess whether their students truly understood and learned the major topic(s). Instead of using the typical test, another way of assessing student knowledge is allowing them to choose from a list of suggested projects that will demonstrate their understanding of the topic(s). Students could be given the opportunity to write a traditional paper, poetry, short story, compose and perform an original musical score, perform a drama, create a piece or pieces of art (pottery, photography, drawing, painting, etc), create a short film, and so forth. The students should be given an opportunity to present their finished product at which time they can explain how their work relates to the main topic. By giving students sufficient time to think of and develop a project, students will be given the unique opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge in a creative way that is meaningful and interesting to them.
 * Assessing Student Knowledge**