K20 LEARN
OPTIC - A Reading Strategy Recipe: Visual Literacy
A visual literary lesson plan provides learners with OPTIC (Observations, Predictions, Themes, Inferences, Conclusions), a reading strategy to help them understand and interpret visual and written texts. Scholars practice the strategy...
Curated OER
Guided Reading with Elizabeti's Doll
Practice reading strategies using Elizabeti's Doll by Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen. Readers utilize decoding and comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading the story. A detailed list of text features, high frequency words,...
Curated OER
Comprehension Strategies: Drawing Inferences
The proof is in the details! A richly detailed plan provides clear examples of how to draw inferences from text and how to provide support drawn directly from the text.
K20 LEARN
Considering "Charles": Pictograms, Annotations, Reading Strategies, And Multimodal Responses
Shirley Jackson's short story, "Charles," provides middle schoolers with an opportunity to practice their close reading skills. Using the provided list of prompts, scholars read and reread the story, then create a multimodal response to...
Curated OER
Guided Reading: Asking Questions
Here is a reading strategies lesson in which learners use post it notes to create a bulletin board. They post their new questions on the bulletin board and look back at questions they have already learned the answer to. A great idea,...
EngageNY
Close Reading: Unpacking Specific Articles of the UDHR
Lesson 6 of this extensive unit finally has your class begin to work their way through specific articles from the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Before examining the rights actually detailed in the document,...
Curated OER
Questioning
Practice making predictions by looking at the cover of a book. You can use The Hungry Thing, as suggested here, or any other book you may be reading in class. Use the predictions to talk about good reading strategies. A chart is included...
Curated OER
Phineas Gage: “This I Believe” Venn Diagrams After Reading Strategy
Difficulties with brain injuries still continue today. After reading Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science, class members read a series of modern personal essays about brain injuries and choose an essay to compare...
Curated OER
Reading and Responding -- Lesson 14
Fourth graders work independently or in a small group to (1) read a fictional passage, (2) use context clues to define unfamiliar vocabulary, (3) use comprehension strategies, and (4) make inferences. Reading passages and comprehension...
Curated OER
During Reading Strategies
"How important is freedom to you and your family?" The guiding question becomes much more powerful after your class reads and responds to a passage from a historical novel. While reading the passage, they complete a graphic organizer...
EngageNY
Mid-Unit Assessment: Close Reading of the "Spadefoot Toad"
A mid-unit assessment challenges scholars to use their close reading skills to identify the main idea and key details. After reading a brief excerpt, learners answer a series of questions—multiple-choice, short answer—complete a graphic...
EngageNY
Inferring Laurence Yep’s Perspective of Being Chinese, from the “Being Chinese” Excerpt of The Lost Garden
It's all about perspective! Using the resource, scholars read a third excerpt from Laurence Yep's autobiography, The Lost Garden. As they read, individuals complete graphic organizers using clues from the text to infer the author's...
Hampton-Brown
From "First Crossing"
Young scholars look closely at four tales taken from the collection of short stories, First Crossing edited by Donald R. Galloby. While examining the life of four teenagers and the lives they lead as U.S. immigrants, your enthusiastic...
EngageNY
Inferring Laurence Yep’s Perspective on the Police, from the Crime in the Neighborhood Excerpt of The Lost Garden
Gist get to the point! Pupils read another excerpt from The Lost Garden, author Laurence Yep's autobiography. Working with partners, scholars annotate the text to look for the gist and record unfamiliar vocabulary in their word catchers.
Hampton-Brown
Esperanza Rising
Accompany a reading of the novel, Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan, with a series of lessons that dive deep into the literary world of a young girl and the journey she takes to start a new life. Lessons and their...
College Board
Reading—Central Idea and Evidence
Young readers become experts at finding the central idea in informational text with an educational resource. The resource includes helpful tips to annotating close passages to succeed on the actual SAT exam, as well as strategies to make...
Curated OER
Unwind: Directed Reading Thinking Activity
To generate interest in reading Neal Shusterman's young adult science fiction novel Unwind, class members engage in a Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA) that asks them to examine the front and back covers, the blurbs, and "The...
Curated OER
Using Wordless Comics To Help Create Meaning in Reading
Use picture cues as a tool in order to create meaning along with text. With a wordless comic, young illustrators discuss the main idea and character traits, and independently write a summary for a page of a wordless comic. This strategy...
Ontario
Reading Graphic Text
Do learners really need to be taught how to read cartoons, comic books, and comic strips? Yes. Just as they need to learn how to read other forms of graphic text such as diagrams, photos, timetables, maps, charts, and tables. Young...
Curated OER
Dr. Seuss and Read Across America
What important facts about Dr. Seuss influenced the Read Across America movement...? This is the driving question of a research project that requires scholars to find information about Dr. Seuss' life and work. Class members write a...
Curated OER
Two Greedy Bears
Improving listening comprehension skills is the goal of this language arts lesson. Young readers listen to the story Two Greedy Bears, stopping to have discussions with a partner. They predict outcomes and make inferences based on...
K20 LEARN
Between The Lines: Inferences In The Narrative Life Of Frederick Douglass Excerpt
Good literature can be much like an iceberg requiring readers to presume that the bulk of the meaning may be inferred to be found below the surface. Here's a lesson that asks scholars to conduct a close reading of passages from The...
Curated OER
Maus: After Reading Strategy Instructional Routine
Class members create literary mandalas for two characters from Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about his father’s experiences with the Holocaust. After finding quotes that reveal three good traits and three bad traits of each...
EngageNY
Close Reading: “Natural Resources and the Canadian Economy”
Readers continue to learn how natural resources are important to Canada's economy. They read, annotate, and answer text-dependent questions about Natural Resources and the Canadian Economy. They then discuss key terms in the text.