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.

Need a promotion? Then have your students participate in a writing lesson that will have them voting for you! Give students the opportunity to place teachers in the spotlight, as they persuade others why teachers make the best presidents.

What do red envelopes, pomelos, and water narcissus flowers have in common? They all bring good fortune during the Chinese New Year! In this lesson, students will write about someone to whom they would like to grant good fortune.

Give your students a chance to hone their reading comprehension skills as they learn about the characters, setting, and plot of their favorite fiction books by creating a story map.

Help your class grasp the concept of "main idea" with this fun, hands-on lesson. Students will dive into mystery bags full of supportive detail clues to determine the main idea of each bag.

Everyone loves an intriguing introduction! Help your second graders hook their readers as they practice writing new and improved introductions to well-loved fictional stories in this fun writing lesson.

This lesson will help your students summarize short stories and describe how characters respond to challenges using a story map. Use this lesson as a stand-alone activity or a support lesson for the Story Mapping Group Work lesson plan.

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.

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.

Thinking about who, what, when, where, and why isn’t just for detectives! Students will practice gleaning important information from texts using these questions and a few other tools.

This lesson teaches kids all about Malcolm X and how his childhood influenced him to become one of America's most well known, controversial, and revolutionary figures. First kids will listen to a read-aloud authored by Malcolm X's daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, and then they will write an informative paragraph.