Use this story map and your choice of short fiction passages to develop your students’ reading comprehension skills with this group reading lesson.

Text formatting can add a lot of richness to how information is explained. In this lesson students will explore the organization of nonfiction texts and go on a scavenger hunt for different kinds of text formatting features.

Help your second graders hone their research skills using this animal-themed lesson! Students will enjoy choosing an animal, identifying questions, and researching their answers as they learn about writing informative essays.

St. Patrick's Day is a widely popular holiday all over the world. Teach your students about some interesting traditions as they write an informative text about how St. Patrick's Day is celebrated.

Start Your Engines! It's time to teach your students how to summarize fiction text as you race down Summary Raceway.

Are your second graders struggling with reading comprehension? Help them understand how prosody can help their understanding of the text with this reading lesson plan.

Use this lesson to help your students learn how to find the main idea and details in a nonfiction text using a graphic organizer for support.

Help your ELs use transition words as they make predictions and summarize a short fictional text. This lesson can be used as a stand alone activity or a support lesson.

Encourage your students to translate their understanding of theme to poetry. In this lesson, students will evaluate the theme of poems by sketching pictures and citing text evidence.

Food and grocery shopping will take on a different perspective for students by the end of this activity. Students may even find themselves keeping a closer eye on their pennies!

Your students will practice searching for clues to uncover the main idea and supporting details in nonfiction texts about John Muir and Day of the Dead traditions around the world.

Similes, metaphors, and idioms are some of the most widely used literary devices in both speaking and writing. Students will review each of these and practice creating some of their own.

Give your ELs concrete experience with adverbs and adverbial phrases as a tool to discover details in nonfiction texts. Use this as a stand-alone lesson or as support to the Hey! What's the Big Idea? lesson.

Good storytelling always includes a great ending! Your students will learn academic vocabulary and add their own conclusion to a short story. Use this as a stand-alone lesson or as an introduction to the Write Your Own Ending lesson plan.

Look at history! In this lesson, guide students through an exploration of the context, causes, and effects of the Transcontinental Railroad, and help them practice identifying the main idea and supporting details in a nonfiction text.

Nourish your child's inner writer with this lesson on three different forms of literature: poetry, prose, and drama. After going through some examples of each, students will demonstrate their knowledge by filling out bubble maps.

Figurative language can be difficult, especially for ELs. With the help of context clues and exposure to common idioms, it can be a piece of cake! Use this as a stand-alone lesson or as a pre-lesson for the Take a Walk with Idioms lesson.

Students will learn about the holiday El Día de los Muertos through engaging activities and connecting to their own traditions.

Understanding the big idea of a nonfiction text and being able to write a succinct summary are key fourth grade skills. This lesson focuses on summarizing a nonfiction passage in three to four sentences.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a 17th century writer and philosopher who today is considered one of the first documented feminists and advocates for women’s education. In this lesson, students will read two nonfiction texts about Sor Juana and discuss her life and accomplishments before writing an opinion piece about her.

Have your students stretch their creativity with this lesson that teaches them about haikus and has them practice their syllable counting.

This lesson provides students with the opportunity to critically think about data. Use this lesson alongside Line Plots: Representing the Length of Classroom Items or as a stand alone lesson.

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.

Take your students to a magical place by having them read stories such as "The Ugly Duckling" and "Rumpelstiltskin." They can read these magical stories and figure out the main idea and details in them!

Once students have selected a topic related to a piece of literature they have read and mapped out their argument, this lesson will help them turn their prewriting into an essay.

Your students’ organization and prewriting skills will shine as they introduce their topic, state an opinion, and list three supporting reasons.

Your class' prewriting skills will burst with style as they state opinion and supporting reason sentences with descriptive adjectives.

Your students will love learning all about the playful characters in a classic read-aloud text while digging into what makes characters unique. Use as a stand-alone or support lesson for the How to Analyze a Character lesson plan.

Emphasize student understanding and reasoning! This lesson plan helps learners solve story problems using sense-making strategies. This can be used alongside the lesson Solving Word Problems or as a stand-alone lesson.

Let's get reading! In this lesson, students will identify the main idea and details of a nonfiction text. Use this on its own or as support for the lesson Connecting the Coasts: Effects of the Transcontinental Railroad.