In this lesson, students use highlighters, graphic organizers, and a classic fable to exercise their understanding of key details and main idea in a text. They will use manipulatives to promote visual and kinetic learning styles.

This lesson focuses on how punctuation affects reading fluency and comprehension using graphic organizers and sentence stems. Use this lesson as a stand-alone activity or a support for the Punctuation and Prosody lesson plan.

Students will use a combination of graphic organizers in this lesson plan to learn about famous African American poets and their poetry. They will work in groups to research a famous poet, and choose one of their poems to analyze. Then, they'll share their findings with the class.

The hardest part of writing an essay can be the first few steps. This lesson and accompanying graphic organizers will help students map out their ideas and practice crafting paragraphs. With this support, your writers will be off and running!