Amplify Classroom K–5 onboarding guide
With an Amplify Classroom account, you get free, high-quality lessons and teaching tools across math, science, and literacy, designed to delight students and give you real-time visibility into their thinking.
Here’s everything you need to start teaching today.
What’s free for K–5 teachers?
Everything below is completely free with your Amplify Classroom account. Select a category to learn more about what’s included.
Teach your first lesson.
Ready to start teaching? Follow our step-by-step guide and you’ll be crushing it in front of your class in no time.
Step 1
Choose a lesson.
Head to our discover page and use the search bar, or filter by subject or grade, to find the right lesson for your class.
Tip: Looking for grade-level collections? Browse our featured collections to explore lessons by grade, subject, and more.
Step 2
Review teaching materials.
Take a few minutes to explore what’s included in your lesson. Most lessons include both print and digital resources, giving you the flexibility to teach in the format that works best for your class.
Browse each tab to prep:
- Screens: Preview the interactive activity screens your students will engage with.
- About: Review today’s goals and a breakdown of the lesson.
- Resources: Explore print resources, activity PDFs, Teacher and Student Editions (math only), and supporting materials.
Step 3
Start teaching.
When you’re ready to kick off the lesson, select the Teach or Assign button to get started. Here’s the difference:
Teach: Project your presentation screens to the class while students follow along with print materials. Use each screen to spark discussion and guide your students through the lesson.
Assign: Invite students to join the lesson digitally. As they work through the lesson, you can monitor their responses in real time and highlight their thinking with the class. You can assign it directly to your class or generate a temporary session code.
Step 4
Celebrate student thinking in real time.
Once you start your lesson, you unlock the Teacher Dashboard—built to bring student thinking to the whole class, even when devices are put away.
Capture and share student ideas in real time, annotate on screens, and manage your lesson from a second device so you’re untethered from the front of the class.
Note: Available when you select the Teach button. Your experience may look slightly different if you select Assign instead.
Turn any printed work into a whole-class discussion. Snap a photo of student work and instantly share it with your class.
Find the right math activity for you.
Amplify Classroom offers 800+ free K–12 math lessons on topics such as fractions, addition and subtraction, geometry, measurement, and more.
Full lessons
Free math lessons that spark curiosity and build conceptual understanding, fluency, and real-world application—complete with print and digital resources.
Each lesson includes:
- Student and Teacher editions
- Presentation Screens
- Activity PDFs
Tip: Using a different program? Our lessons can be used alongside any core math program.
Personalized learning and intervention
These activities are designed to provide supplemental and intervention support for your learners across topics like place value, multiplication, and fractions. These include self-paced digital activities, as well as print activities.
Choose from:
- Print mini-lessons
- Digital personalized learning activities
Centers
Support hands-on instruction and collaboration with these game-based Center activities. These activities are designed to strengthen student engagement and reinforce key skills and concepts like counting, fractions, perimeter, area, multiplication, and spatial reasoning.
Find the right literacy activity for you.
Amplify Classroom offers 130+ free literacy lessons support your literacy instruction, from exciting knowledge-building stories to engaging phonics activities. These lessons are built on the Science of Reading.
Knowledge-building lessons (K–5)
Topic-based lessons immerse students in rich stories and subject matter, building the critical thinking and real-world understanding students need to navigate the world around them.
- K–3: Fairy tales, folk tales, fables, tall tales, classic children’s novels
- 4–5: American Innovation and Global Architecture
Skill-building lessons (K–3)
Foundational reading lessons are designed to help students grow in the skills they use to read and write. These lessons introduce students to letter names and sounds, blending, word recognition, and writing in different genres.
Phonics activities (K–2)
Short, interactive activities build phonics skills and language development; activities cover letter and phoneme recognition, rhymes and syllables, and beginning, middle, and ending sounds.
Find the right science lesson for you.
Our free interactive science lessons cover life science, earth science, physical science, lessons on the Earth’s tilt, and hereditary traits, plus quick vocabulary activities.
Seasons (Grades 4–8)
Students manipulate online models of the Earth to better understand the seasons.
Energy in Motion (Grades 4–8)
Students explore the concepts of energy in motion, speed, and collision, and create models using materials typically found in a science classroom.
Organisms and Ecosystems (Grades 4–8)
Students learn that living organisms have important roles in the survival of an ecosystem.
Shaping the Earth (Grades 4–8)
Students uncover the different factors that change Earth’s surface, and uncover the ways in which geologists use clues to describe Earth’s distant past.
Heredity (Grades 4–8)
Students use the Polypad interactive tool to explore how birds’ heredity is affected by different factors.
Vocabulary Games (Grades K–8)
Students build and make connections with vocabulary in Earth and space science through several digital vocabulary games.
Explore math hands-on with Polypad virtual manipulatives.
Bring K–5 math to life with free virtual manipulatives, from number cards and fraction bars to pattern blocks and more.
Whether you’re teaching number sense and addition in early grades or fractions and geometry in upper elementary, Polypad makes it easy to demonstrate concepts or let students explore on their own!
Bring K–5 math concepts to life.
Number sense
Split number cards to develop student understanding of place value.
Fractions
Easily create equivalent fractions using fraction bars and fraction circles.
Pattern blocks
Arrange pattern blocks to explore area relationships among different polygons.
Get free math fluency practice teachers and students enjoy.
In just five to ten minutes a day, students practice important math facts and grade-level skills with personalized digital cards that adapt to their progress.
Students receive a personalized set of cards each day, including Fact Fluency for developing recall of essential math facts, Skill Fluency for practicing important grade-level skills, and visual representations that support flexible, accurate, and efficient thinking.
Our K–5 Fluency sets include:
- Numbers by Heart
- Addition and Subtraction by Heart I
- Addition and Subtraction by Heart II
- Multiplication by Heart
- Division by Heart
Find free warm-ups and activities (15–30 minutes).
Looking for something shorter to engage your class? We offer free activities to kick off any lesson, from brainbreaks to puzzles to seasonal activities and more.
Quick warm-up activities
Whether you’re teaching our classroom openers or introducing puzzles of the day, our premade Polypad activities are designed to boost engagement and bring delight to your math class.
Community-authored activities
Our incredible community of teachers have made incredible lessons. Check out our growing collection of vetted teacher-authored activities.
Seasonal activities
Get students into the spirit of each season with free seasonal activities covering fall, winter, spring, and summer. They’re a fun way to start class or transition between topics throughout the year.
Watch it in action: Launch a K–5 lesson in real time.
See how this third grade teacher launches a typical Amplify Classroom lesson from the gathering rug to get students locked in and eager to participate in the lesson.
View the print resources and try this lesson for free: Grade 3, Unit 2, Lesson 5: Rectangle and Arrays.
Free professional development and resources
Level up your learning with live and on-demand webinars to help you bring interactive learning to life in your classroom. Learn how to use our powerful free tools like Polypad virtual manipulatives or Activity Builder to customize and build your own lessons.
- View our schedule of live webinars and interactive sessions all in one place, and earn PD certificates as you learn.
- Explore our PD Library with on-demand PD you can watch anytime.
Frequently asked questions about Amplify Classroom
Amplify Classroom is completely free for K–12 teachers. With a free account, you get access to more than a thousand lessons across math, science, and literacy, as well as Polypad virtual manipulatives and fluency flashcards—all in one place.
Teaching your first Amplify Classroom lesson is easier than you think. Browse the Discover page to find the right lesson, review your materials—including Teacher Moves for every step—then hit “Present” or “Assign” to get started. Our step-by-step guide can walk you through it all.
Amplify Classroom’s free resources for K–5 teachers include 800+ problem-based math lessons, 130+ literacy lessons built on the Science of Reading, and interactive science lessons. You also get Polypad virtual manipulatives, personalized fluency flashcards, and quick 10- to 15-minute warm-up activities—all in one place, all free.
Yes. Many teachers use Amplify Classroom to supplement their existing curriculum. The platform can be integrated into any part of a teacher’s day, with a wide library of lessons and tools for core or supplemental instruction.
For schools seeking a full core curriculum, Amplify also offers paid programs including Amplify Desmos Math and Amplify CKLA, both fully integrated into the platform. Amplify Classroom is designed to work alongside any core curriculum you’re already teaching.
The teacher dashboard is a real-time monitoring tool that gives you a window into what your students are thinking, right as they’re thinking it. At any moment, you can pause the class, manage pacing, anonymize student names, sync everyone to your screen, and put student ideas on display for the whole class to celebrate.
Yes. Amplify Classroom’s free lesson-building tool (Activity Builder) lets you customize our activities to fit your students’ needs. Click “Copy and Edit” on any of our customizable lessons, and you can add screens, modify content, or drag in components such as multiple choice questions, notes, media, graphs, and more—no experience needed.