Help your students absorb the details of a text and make inferences about what they read with the strategy of close reading. By reading closely, students will become better able to understand complex themes and nuances in a text.
Use this lesson to teach your students to identify story elements and compare them to another text's story elements. This lesson can stand alone or be used as a pre-lesson for the Comparing Texts by the Same Author lesson.
This lesson teaches your students to pay attention to small words, such as adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, to make a big difference in reading comprehension! Use as a stand-alone lesson or as a pre-lesson for Close Reading: Introduction.
In this literary lesson, students use fairy tales to practice identifying character traits. Students are challenged to justify their reasoning using text based support.
Students will have a blast turning a reading passage into a Reader's Theater skit. This lesson teaches them to use dialogue to help readers understand the experiences of different characters.
Students will learn how to identify story elements and create a short and sweet summary. They will fill out a graphic organizer and solidify their understanding by creating illustrations to show major plot points that they find themselves!
Change is inevitable, even for story characters! In this lesson, your students will determine how a character changes throughout a story by focusing on the character’s dialogue and actions.
Give students a chance to experience a different point of view! This fANTastic lesson on narrative style turns young readers into characters of Chris Van Allsburg's Two Bad Ants.
What's your "it"? This lesson incorporates Tony Dungy's You Can Do It! into some hands-on activities that help students learn about different character traits.
This lesson thoughtfully scaffolds the reading skill of predicting. Students are introduced to the concept and get to practice making predictions. They will apply what they have learned during a focused independent reading activity.
Improve reading comprehension with a lesson on cause and effect! In this lesson, students will use a T-chart to identify examples of cause and effect in and by the end, you’ll all be singing along to the cause and effect song!
This lesson gives students the chance to demonstrate and reinforce their knowledge of sequencing. Have them role play a fantasy text to practice sequencing!
Teach your students to ask and differentiate between recall questions and inferential questions. This lesson will help build a classroom culture around asking deep, inferential questions.
This lesson helps students learn about asking and answering questions about a text. It also exposes them to valuable lessons about trying to figure out their dreams and not giving up along the way.
It’s time to get those magnifying glasses out! In this lesson, students will act as detectives, searching for clues about idioms. Who can find the clues that lead to the meanings of various idioms?
Is it real or is it fantasy? This lesson introduces students to the literary concepts of realism and fantasy. Readers will practice this skill by using details in texts to distinguish the two genre elements.
Let’s put it all together! In this lesson, students will explore the different parts of a drama or play. By the end of the lesson they will be able to define terminology related to plays and give examples of the unique genre features!
Teach your students about text clues that will help them read with expression. This lesson can stand alone or be used as a pre-lesson for the Reader's Theater: Read the Script lesson.
Every student is unique. This lesson emphasizes that uniqueness by having young learners use similes to share some of the traits that make them special. It features Quick as a Cricket by Audrey Wood and a fantastic storyboard exercise.
Expose your students to the wonderful genre of drama, but be sure to teach them the important key terms so they understand the structure. Use this as a stand alone lesson or a pre-lesson for the Putting a Play Together! lesson.
The proof is in the pudding! Use this lesson to teach your students how to use text evidence as proof when answering questions after reading. They will use evidence-based terms as they answer basic comprehension questions.
Teach your students to make predictions as they read, and it guides them to use text evidence to back up their predictions. Use this as a stand-alone lesson or as a pre-lesson for Making Predictions Lesson.
Use this lesson to help your ELs learn how to create a simple summary, paying attention to the sequence in a story. This lesson can stand alone or be used as a pre-lesson for the Simple Summaries lesson.
What the character will do next? Designed to teach students the skill of predicting characters’ actions, this lesson guides students to use clues and evidence from the text to make their predictions. Let’s follow those clues!