Lessons and Ideas

...and the other president you can thank for the crazy shopping afterward. Most of us associate Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but Turkey Day wasn't official until good old Honest Abe came along. Abraham Lincoln is the US president who made Thanksgiving a national holiday, and he did it in the midst of the Civil War. He proclaimed the first official national "day of thanks" on November 26, 1863. From then on, Thanksgiving was observed on the last Thursday of each November. Then in 1939, in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt had an idea.…

Have you ever wanted to travel to another planet? We certainly do. And when we were doing research for our solar system rap video, "Confessions of a Planet," we thought it would be a good excuse to figure out just how much gas we might need to reach Jupiter. (When we go into space, we go big.) So what is the distance of Jupiter from Earth? It turns out that the answer is complicated. In our heliocentric universe, everyone can tell you how far the planets are from the sun. The number varies throughout the year due to our elliptical…

Many of you know Flocabulary for the word that rhymes with (and inspired) our company name. But did you know that we have a full math curriculum, too? This month, we're featuring our multiplication math song "Gimme Six" for free! Listen in to get multiplying now, and then complete our math multiplication sheet afterward to review. If you like "Gimme Six," sign up for a free trial to get access to our entire math curriculum. We've got dozens of math songs and exercises to amp up your addition, subtraction, multiplication and division lessons.

Use our Much Ado About Nothing Lesson Plan and video to teach about characterization. Our Much Ado About Nothing rap brings you something you've probably never seen before: Shakespeare--the man himself--rapping. And it nicely summarizes the play. But what's more, the song is a great starting point for a lesson on characterization. Use the song and this worksheet to help students pick out Shakespeare's characterization in Much Ado About Nothing. The lesson is versatile: You can use this Much Ado About Nothing lesson plan to introduce the characters at the beginning of the play, as an ongoing characterization lesson as you read,…

Teach Figurative Language With Flocabulary

“Cooler than a polar bear’s toenails…” -Big Boi

In the world of figurative language, the simile is king. Or rather, the simile is like the king. This rap simile activity will get you and your students creating their own similes, and then the class will have to guess whether similes were written by a famous rapper or their classmate. You’ll be surprised how hard it is to tell. This simile activity is a favorite in our trainings, and we think you’ll have fun with it, too.