PBS
Pbs Learning Media: Walmart Middle School Litercy Initiative
Interactive, student-paced lessons on such literacy skills as categorizing, comparing and contrasting, summarizing, evaluating, determining cause and effect, using text features, connecting, inferring, sequencing, understanding problems...
E Reading Worksheets
E Reading Worksheets: Text Structure Practice 1
This interactive worksheet provides 10 questions: each includes a reading passage which students read and select the patterns of organization used in each passage. RI.11-12.3 Text development
Polk Brothers Foundation Center for Urban Education at DePaul University
De Paul University: Center for Urban Education: Comprehensive Questions: Nonfiction [Pdf]
Questions are provided to help students determine the main idea, topic, and fact versus opinion of a nonfiction piece. Students are prompted to write a summary of an informational text.
Other
Curriculum Associates: Determining Theme or Central Idea [Pdf]
In this reading comprehension lesson unit, learners are guided in learning how to find the main theme or idea of a text and understanding how details in the text convey that. Includes lots of exercises and examples, as well as...
ReadWriteThink
Read Write Think: Creative Writing Through Wordless Picture Books
Need help planning ways to creatively teach your students chronological order? Here's a great place to start. While the site is specifically geared toward the middle school student, it is a teaching idea which could easily be adapted for...
ReadWriteThink
Read Write Think: Expository Escapade: Detective's Handbook
Working on higher-level thinking skills with your readers is made easier with this lesson. You will have your learners connect with and analyze a mystery story at their grade-appropriate level. Lesson plan, printable worksheets, and...
Other
Academic Reading: Sample Task [Pdf]
This Academic Reading task provides a practice assessment for identifying headings and subheadings. In the task, students must read the selection and then determine the best subheading for each of the sections.
Other
Reading Quest: Strategies for Reading Comp.: History Frames: Story Maps
This activity will help you teach students chronological order as well as identifying key people and events. Printable worksheets.
University of Houston
University of Houston: Extra! Extra! What's the Big Idea?!
Get the feel of running a newspaper by selecting articles and pictures. If you are interested in checking out real newspapers, there is a clickable list of online newspapers for younger readers.
Beacon Learning Center
Beacon Learning Center: Trailblazing Introductions
This tutorial focuses on the introduction for an expository essay or research paper. It states the purpose of an introduction, what should be included, and ways to begin.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Metamorphosis Stories of Change
The goal of this activity is for students to learn how to tell a story in order to make a complex topic (such as global warming or ozone holes) easier for a reader to grasp. Students realize that the narrative impulse underlies even...
Read Works
Read Works: Passages: The Process of Acting
[Free Registration/Login Required] Students read a nonfiction text about what it takes to be an actor and answer questions about comprehension, main idea, supporting details, vocabulary, transitions, and more. Links to a paired text and...
Sophia Learning
Sophia: Introductions
This tutorial focuses on introductions; it lists and explains three common components of introductions: motivator, thesis, and blueprint. It provides a sample introduction with commentary showing each of the parts. It discusses the...
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Write an Expository And/or Procedural Text (English 6 Writing)
You will learn how to write an expository/procedural text with a variety of sentence structures, rhetorical devices, transitions, appropriate facts, and details.
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Write an Expository And/or Procedural Text
[Accessible by TX Educators. Free Registration/Login Required] You will learn how to write an expository/procedural text that synthesizes ideas from several sources.
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Themes in Literary Texts (English 6 Reading)
Learn how to infer the implicit theme in a work of fiction, distinguish theme from topic, and make complex inferences using textual evidence.
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Synthesize Ideas in Informational/expository Text
[Accessible by TX Educators. Free Registration/Login Required] Learn how to synthesize and make logical connections between ideas within a text and across two or three texts representing similar or different genres and to support the...
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Synthesize Ideas in Informational/expository Texts
[Accessible by TX Educators. Free Registration/Login Required] Learn how to synthesize and make logical connections between ideas within a text and across two or three texts representing similar or different genres (including literary...
CommonLit
Common Lit: Where Did I Come From
CommonLit.org is a wonderful resource to use in a Language Arts classroom. Each story or article is accompanied by guided reading questions, assessment questions, and discussion questions. In addition, students can click on words to see...
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)
Ascd: Building Literacy in Social Studies: Ch 1: Reading Social Studies Texts
Article provides excellent tips and strategies for building comprehension and critical thinking skills in Social Studies. It describes some of the challenges students have with reading and understanding their textbooks.
Other
Reading Quest: Making Sense of Social Studies
Teaching students to read well in areas other than language arts requires teaching and reinforcing the kinds of reading strategies taught here. There are 27 strategies, ranging from brainstorming to word mapping. The site includes PDF...
Better Lesson
Better Lesson: Analyzing Text Complexity of Non Fiction Sources
This instructional activity will help students read and comprehend nonfiction, specifically biographies, through determining criteria for text complexity. Included is a PDF and Smart Notebook titled Determining Text Complexity, and an...
Texas Education Agency
Texas Gateway: Teaching Elements of Personal Narrative Texts
This resource presents instructional writing practices that support content-area learning, with specific strategies for teaching the thinking skills, processes, and knowledge needed to effectively write personal narrative texts. Some of...
PBS
Pbs Learning Media: Out of Proportion
Students are asked to explain how natural disasters affect environmental health.