UNIT AND THEME STUDIES
IDEAS FOR PROJECTS AND RESEARCH

101 Activities for English Language Learning: Content-based Ideas with Easy Internet RE-sources by Charles F. Hirsch and Deborah Lazarus. A Rigby Press publication. Portions for classroom use only are reproducible. This book will be useful for those who teach English language learners from grades 1-4 in a variety of different settings. It provides content-based learning, thematic organization of activities, flexible selections that work with a variety of learning styles and classroom settings, and tips on effective navigation and use of the Internet. Unit themes include I Like Me; We've Got the Whole World; Working Together; From City to City; From 1 to 100; Weather and Seasons; Big, Little, Light, Heavy; Yesterday and Today; Earth and Space; Growing Things; Critters and Creatures; and Celebrations. This should prove to be a valuable resource to those who have English language learners in their classes who who teach bi-lingual education. RBTY-73469. $14.36-D

 

 

 

 

Chocolate Thematic Unit by Janna Reed. Teacher Created Resources, 2005. For grades 3-5. Books used in this study include The Chocolate Touch  by Patrick S. Catling; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory  by Roald Dahl; and Vanilla, Chocolate, and Strawberry by Bonnie Busenberg.  Besides all the literature related activities, there are writing and poetry activities and cross-curricular activities in the fields of language arts, math, science, social studies,  art, and life skills. The culminating activity is  Chocolate Town, related to Milton Hershey. A bibliography is included, as well as an answer key. Reproducible. 80 pages.  BTH-2566. $8.99-D Click on image to enlarge it.

 

Family Tapestry by Barbara Yamamoto. Dandy Lion Publications, 1998. This book goes way beyond helping students make a family tree. It helps students look into their family histories, immigration, and their heredity. As students explore these areas, they learn more about what was involved in the process of immigrating to America. They also learn biological principles of heredity. Most important of all, they discover what makes their family unique and what choices their ancestors made that affect them today. Then they are asked to think through how the choices they make today will affect their descendents. 64 pages. This book is reproducible and is best used for grades 5-8. BTH-1638.$10.76-D

 

 

 

 

Guides to History Plus, a Design-a-Study book by Kathryn Stout. This book helps you make your own unit study for an exciting and thorough look at any historical period, civilization or event using the books from your own or the public library. A section on activities helps you integrate your history and geography with the other subjects. The book includes geography references, map skills, reproducible maps, and instructions for making your own timeline. This newer version has added detailed grade 6-12 objectives for social studies listed by topic: history, geography, government, and economics. Questions and topics for discussion or composition provide practice in analysis. It also includes titles of fiction, games, and movies on video arranged by period and topic to supplement grade 6-12 studies of geography, American, and world history.
Cat. #1521, $14.00* Older version without the extra materials for classroom teachers still available for limited time for 9.00*   BTH-1709

Cover of How to Create Your Own Unit Study How to Create Your Own Unit Study by Valerie Bendt. This is the original spiral edition. There may be some light wear to the cover. These are only still available until the present supply is gone. Explains the unit study approach and reviews some math and phonics curriculum materials. Discusses schedules and routines; getting started; and using the library, games and teaching aids, and dictation and copying. Explains the importance of writing, evaluates the usefulness of projects, and directs in choosing your units of study. There are some ideas for record-keeping and some sample unit studies. BTH-5711. $12.75-D

 

 

 

HANDS-ON HERITAGE SERIES: Brings country studies to life with games, crafts, recipes, and other activities that get students physically involved.

 

 

DL-38.gif (8304 bytes) Inventions, Inventors, and You by Diane Drazw. A Dandy Lion Publication: This useful book takes inventions out of the history book and brings them to life in the classroom. A unique combination of research and creativity training allows students to explore how our lives have been affected by inventions while they build their own creative skills. This book offers something for every teaching and learning style. It provides ideas for directed lessons, warm up questions, learning centers, reproducible worksheets, individual project ideas, and an inventions reference list. There are several concepts presented in this book that are repeated in the lessons, worksheets and projects. Some of these concepts are:

A unit on inventions and inventing is a unit on thinking. This guide gives you the tools to implement this thought-provoking unit easily in your classroom. For grades 3-7. Cat. BTH-591. $10.76-D

DL-136.jpg (17732 bytes) Jury Trials in the Classroom by Betty M. See. For grades 5-8. This book contains six trial simulations that encourage students to delve into  criminal and civil law with cases that mirror situations in literature -- Miss Muffet, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and Jill, Romeo and Juliet -- and in history -- the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Students will play the attorneys, defendants, witnesses, jury members, and courtroom personnel. They will use statements of fact and witness affidavits to simulate a trial and determine guilt or innocence. Participation in these realistic jury trials will motivate students to exercise their reasoning skills, improve their communication skills, and apply their knowledge of the legal system. The jury trials can enhance course in both language arts and civics. The book begins by laying a foundation of knowledge about the judicial systems and courts in the United States. Student pages are reproducible for classroom use. 159 pages. BTH-584. $20.66-D

 

 

DL-148.jpg (14865 bytes)Mystery Disease by Mark A. Bohland. For grades 5-8. A serious illness is sweeping through the small community of Jamestown. Why are all these people sick? Where did they catch the disease? Student take the role of public health workers as they track down the source of the illness. This problem-based unit combines science, social studies, math, research, group collaboration, and communication as students work in teams to solve he problem and present their findings. This unit should be very relevant to students who are hearing about new diseases on the media quite frequently now. Student pages are reproducible for classroom use. 88 pages. BTH-23. $11.66-D

 

 

 

 

 

ccov118.gif (132851 bytes)On Trial: A Criminal Trial Simulation -- The Case Against the Big Bad Wolf by Margaret Schweitzer. This clever simulation that teaches about the workings of the trial system puts the Big Bad Wolf on trial for destroying the pigs' houses. While you may think you know what happened in this fairy tale, by assuming roles and using the non-scripted character profiles, students present information that has you wondering if the wolf is guilty or innocent. A jury of classmates will decide. This intriguing unit teaches not only about the judicial system but also develops communication, cooperation and evaluative skills. The easy-to-use unit gives you complete instructions for staging the simulation (including questions for pre-trial and post-trial discussions), vocabulary, reproducible pages to inform students of the trail procedures and their roles and profiles that present information from the various witnesses' perspectives. This is a motivating unit to use with literature studies, a thinking skills course or a unit on the judicial system. For grades 4-6.Click on image to enlarge. BTH-592. $9.86-D

EP004 Art_Lit QLK.JPG (5138 bytes)Quick Learning Kits: Art and Literature, by Linda Milliken. Edupress. Contains 40 easy-to-make literature based activity kits for grades 2-5. Introduces children to a variety of art experiences. There are tie-ins with such books as The Me I See (Hazen), Rembrandt Takes a Walk (Strand), If I Were a Penguin (Gibbons), Ed Emberley's Great Thumbprint Drawing Book, Build a Doodle (Armstrong), Green Says Go (Emberley), The Collage Book (Tofts), Circles;Crescents; Squares; Triangles (Mavis), Color Zoo (Ehlert), The Plaid Cow (Brock), Alphabatics (MacDonald), Seasons on the Farm (Miller), Feathers for Lunch (Ehlert), Drawing from Nature (Arnosky), Lunch (Fleming), Arrow to the Sun (McDermott), The Sandman (Shepherson), Liang and the Magic Paintbrush (Demi), Stone Soup (Ross), The Fortune Tellers (Alexander), Eating the Alphabet (Ehlert), Lift-the-Flap Book of Animal Fun(Campbell), Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like (Williams), Nice or Nasty (Butterworth), The Patchwork Quilt (Flournoy), The Hippopotamus Song (Flanders and Swann), The Rosy Fat Magenta Radish (Wolf), Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing (Barrett), The Snail's Spell (Ryder), Pets in a Jar (Simon), How Many Bugs in a Box? and More Bugs in Boxes (Carter), Hanimals (Mariotti), Somebody and the Three Blairs (Tolhurst), The Great Treasure Hunt (Russo), and Stick Horse (Raney). Cat. # EP-004. $8.06-D

EP005 Lang_Soc Stu QLK.JPG (4617 bytes)Quick Learning Kits: Language and Social Studies, by Linda Milliken. Edupress. Contains 40 easy-to-make literature based activity kits for grades 2-5. Contains activities that involve listening and following instructions, memory skills, finding new uses for familiar things, salesmanship with persuavise speech, using recipes on boxes to learn to write directions on recipes cards, making associations between various objects, learning new words through dictionary digs, practicing addressing envelopes, using junk mail as the basis of a writing activity, hatching stories from plastic eggs, putting characters in unsual setting to spark story ideas, experimetning with different way to tell time, learning more about archaeology though a classroom "dig," learning how animals use camouflage, and many more. Literature links include such books as How a House Happens (Adkins), A Dig in Time (Griffin), Up, Up, and Away (Heller),Amimalia (Base), Steven Caney's Invention Book (Caney), Sugar Ships (Parsley), Bea and Mr. Jones (Schwartz), Max Malone Makes a Million! (Herman), Some Things Go Together (Zolotow), Amos and Boris (Steig), Much Bigger than Martin (Kellogg),Six by Seuss (Dr. Seuss), The Spelling Bee (Gordon), Dear Mr. Henshaw (Cleary), Free Stuff for Kids, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch (Noble), Sheep in a Shop (Shaw), Eight Ate (Terban), Rain (Spier), Arthur's Nose (Brown),Children are Children are Children (Cole, Heller, et all), Sayonara, Mrs. Kackleman (Kalman), Evening Meal (Watson), Ben and Me (Lawson), All Year Long (Tafuri), Knots on a Counting Rope (Martin), Too Clever to See (Taylor), Nature's Tricksters (Lovejoy), Crafty Chameleon (Hadithi), Animals Build Amazing Homes(Santoro), Everybody Needs a Rock (Baylor), Sneakers Meet Your Feet (Cobb), Goat in the Rug (Blood and Link), How to Tape Instant Oral Biographies (Zimmerman), Henry the Explorer (Booth), Henry's World Tour (Quackenbush), You Cheat? (Gilson), Presidential Elections (Children's Press), Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (MacDonald), Where Does the Sun Go at Night? (Ginsburg), The Little House (Burton), The Ocean (Deming, Oceans (Simon), Digging Up Dinosaurs (Aliki), and Tales Mummies Tell (Lauber). Cat. # EP-005. $8.06-D

EP006 Math_Sci QLK.JPG (4625 bytes)Quick Learning Kits: Language and Social Studies, by Linda Milliken. Edupress. Contains 40 easy-to-make literature based activity kits for grades 2-5. For math,students work with geometric shapes, patterns,  geoboards, place value, time, money, area and size; learn to predict answers based on data collection,   measure and balance,  recognize and draw angles and more. Science activities include making a simple magnifying lens, experimenting with water, creating a rainbow, producing friction, determining density, using jumping and bouncing balls to understand gravity, creating a mini-planetarium, discovering how sound travels and how mirrors produce images, and more. Literature links include Jump, Frog, Jump! (Kalan), Amazing Look Through Book (Emberley), How Much is  Million? (Schwartz), The Doorbell Rang (Hutchins), In the Future (Stewart), How Pizza Came to Queens (Kaur), Anno's Counting House (Anno), A Minute is a Minute (Neasi), The Tomorrow Book (Schwerin), Chicken Bucks (Sharpe), The Invitation ( Smee), Science Fun With A Flashlight (Sherman), The Balancing Girl (Rabe), In the Night Kitchen (Sendak), Farmer Mack Measures His Pig (Johnston), City (Macaulay), Eating Fractions (McMillan), Something BIG Has Been Here (Prelustsky), Kitchen Chemistry (Gardner), Air is All Around You (Branley), The Listening Walk (Showers), Who is the Beast? (Baker), Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (Barrett), Scuffy the Tugboat (Crampton), The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System (Cole), Gravity is a Mystery (Madden), The Sky is Full of Stars (Bond), Mushroom in the Rain (Ginsburg), The King Who Rained (Gwynne), First Flight (McPhail), Amazing Magnets (Catherall), and many more. Cat. # EP-006. $8.06-D

SucUtSt.jpg (13508 bytes)Success with Unit Studies, A How To Book by Valerie Bendt, Common Sense Press. Chapter headings are

The appendix contains sample charts and diagrams to help you plan your study. The author has included some blank ones you have permission to reproduce to help you get organized. 88 pages. The author has written notes of inspiration and experience in the very wide margins. There's plenty of room left for your own notes. BTH-4813. $14.50-D

DL-22.jpg (17864 bytes)Talent Scout: Units for Developing Multiple Talents by Carolyn Powell. For grades 4-6. This resource helps nurture all of the multiple intelligences in the curriculum. It contains 24 units covering a wide variety of topics, each with a different activity for each of the seven intelligences. There is also a section with instructions for teachers who want to tailor activities to their specific subjects or needs. The activities can be done as half or whole day festivals as the conclusion of a unit, used in learning centers or in small group or individual enrichment projects. Answers are included. 63 pages.  BTH-593. $10.76-D

 

Three Cheers for Series for Grades 1-2; The monthly titles in this series link activities to state and national standards and also meet accreditation standards for child-created bulletin boards. The activities follow the school calendar and reflect the philosophy that children have different learning styles. The activities are based on the research of Howard Gardner, whose theory of multiple intelligences validates teaching thematically and using a variety of approaches to help children learn. For more specific information on the individual titles and pricing, please click here.

 

 

ccov129.gif (8809 bytes)Understanding Advertising: History, Persuasion Techniques, Mass Media, Target Audiences, Ad Creation by Katherine Howe and Judith Edelstein. Produced by Dandy Lion Publications.
Squeezed between the covers of this book is a tantalizing unit designed to increase students' understanding of the advertising pressures they face everyday and also give them opportunities to create their own ads. Learn how advertisements appeal to human needs, persuasion techniques used, advertisements in different media, and what makes advertisements effective - useful information for everyone. Learning to analyze advertising is an important skill in today's world where children and adults alike are bombarded with an endless stream of TV and radio ads, not to mention those in magazines and newspapers -- and those in-your-face ads in email and on the Internet.

Includes: detailed group lessons, worksheets, and special projects, reproducible for classroom use. 48 pages. For grades 4-6. Cat.# DL-129. $9.86-D

Unit Study Journal: Record Keeping for All Unit Studies, by Amanda Bennett. Gives the teacher a place to record resources for the study, questions students have, field trips, assignments, and a daily log. Cat. #1561, $7.19-D

DL-104.gif (5248 bytes)Using Picture Books with Older Students, Book 1 by Joyce Roberts and Tammy Hall. Produced by Dandy Lion. Publications.
Bring the literary joy and visual delight of picture books into your intermediate or middle school classroom. This is the first in a two-book series. Each book contains three units, each covering a different theme using four dynamic books. This book includes:
 
Designed to integrate literature, thinking skills and the creative arts, the units use Bloom's taxonomy and Gardner's seven intelligences to create activities that students will gladly complete. Each study guide includes high-level thinking questions, creative activities, and a reproducible worksheet. Each unit is completed with thematic culminating activities and a bibliography of related books. 64 pages. For grades 5-8. Cat. #DL-104. $9.86-D

DL-105.gif (5102 bytes)Using Picture Books with Older Students, Book 2 by Joyce Roberts and Tammy Hall. Produced by Dandy Lion. Publications. This is the second in a two-part series. Each of the two books contains three units, each covering a different theme using four dynamic books. This book includes:

Designed to integrate literature, thinking skills and the creative arts, the units use Bloom's taxonomy and Gardner's seven intelligences to create activities that students will gladly complete. Each study guide includes high-level thinking questions, creative activities, and a reproducible worksheet. Each unit is completed with thematic culminating activities and a bibliography of related books. 64 pages. For grades 5-8. Cat. #DL-105. $9.86-D