Help your students' favorite characters come to life in new adventures as student writers draft new endings to their favorite stories.

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.

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.

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.

Use this lesson to help your ELs identify and discuss the author's point and the information that supports it. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support for the What’s the Point? lesson.

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.

Help students learn how to read passages with multiple main ideas and differentiate between main ideas and supporting details by creating a graphic organizer with proof from the text.

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.

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.

Use this lesson to help your ELs understand main idea and supporting details in the context of sentences and paragraphs. It can be a stand-alone lesson or a support lesson to the Power Reading lesson.

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.

Once your students have drafted a persuasive letter, use this lesson to help them polish their writing. Students will use a checklist to ensure that all of the most important parts of their letter are included and the argument is solid.

Help your ELs learn how to identify the main idea and supporting details in a nonfiction text by using nouns and pronouns as guide words. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the lesson Explorer Letters.

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.

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.

This lesson will help students map out their argument essay after they have identified a topic. Students will learn the three basic components of constructing an argument: stating a claim, listing reasons, and providing evidence.

In this lesson, students will identify nouns and pronouns as they distinguish between the main idea and supporting details. It may be taught on its own or used as support for the lesson Compare and Contrast Texts on the Same Topic.

Help your students explain how an author uses reasons and evidence to support particular points in a text by giving them high-interest nonfiction texts to read.

Step into the shoes of an explorer. Students will learn more about the lives and accomplishments of important explorers, and they'll demonstrate their knowledge through a creative writing assignment.

Support your EL students in understanding and identifying the main idea and supporting details in a nonfiction text. This can support the lesson Tip of the Iceberg: Nonfiction Summary Details.

If young writers can learn how to write a solid paragraph, then they have the building blocks of an essay. In this lesson, students will study paragraph structure and practice organizing ideas into paragraphs.

Students will continue their informational writing project by creating an essay outline prior to drafting.

Students will continue their informational writing project by organizing the information they gathered through research. They will use a graphic organizer to organize their ideas and sort their research notes into meaningful sections.