Foster reader confidence when encountering complex text and reinforce the skills readers have acquired to build and extend their understanding of text. The plan uses a section of Douglass’ narrative as an exemplar text. Directions for...

It's the classic scene: Tom Sawyer is whitewashing a fence. Expose your learners to Mark Twain's humor while reinforcing reading comprehension. Eighth graders are encouraged to read and reread, achieving as much exposure to the text as...

Investigate ethical issues surrounding the Decode project in Iceland. Middle and high schoolers take the positions of the Icelandic government, scientific researchers, and citizens and defend or refute the Decode project in a Reykjavik...

Blending basic CVC letters to make words is one of the first steps to independent reading. Provided here are several images of stairs and several letters to cut and arrange. The learner rearranges the letters to form CVC patterns, sounds...

Discover the statistics war. The 42nd video in the Crash Course Statistics series introduces how statistics have proven valuable during wartime. The resource covers the use of statistics in breaking the German code, finding U-boats, and...

Caesar ciphers hide secret missives. A simple interactive lets users encode and decode hidden messages. The cipher method here is the Caesar shift.

What is MS 408? Who wrote it? What does it say? Nobody knows who wrote the Voynich manuscript, nor can anyone translate the text. Introduce viewers to the mystery with a short video that details what little is known about the manuscript.

Beneficial for beginning readers, struggling readers, and those in need of review, a set of language arts activities is a great addition to any foundational reading unit. Focusing on phonological awareness, fluency, instructional...

Go over digraphs, vowel sounds, and affixes with a series of decoding and spelling lessons. Each lesson guides learners through a different reading and phonics skill, building on the lesson before, and challenging them with each step.

All Together Now is the theme of this series of extra support lessons. The collection aids the instruction of blending sounds and reading high-frequency words through writing and reading sentences. Support also engages pupils in...

Spelling can be hard enough without silent letters. Help your third graders decode nine words that have the silent letter W, such as wrinkle or wrong. Once they decipher all nine words, they use each in a new sentence. The bottom of the...

Practice reading with fluency by blending words together. To start, prepare flash cards with pseudowords on them (words that can be pronounced but have no real meaning), and work with the class to sound out the words using known...

Help primary school pupils learn valuable reading strategies. As they choral read a poster or big book, they predict covered words and learn various reading strategies for figuring out an unknown word. This will help them gain an...

A review of decoding words is incorporated in a discussion on reading with expression in order to increase fluency. The teacher gives several book options for readers to practice smooth and inflected reading, giving a short book talk on...

What type of writing is this? Learners read a brief introduction to various types of text: instructions, explanations, poems, folk tales, novels, informative, and arguments. The introduction doesn't explain these, so consider going over...

Good worksheets are hard to find, but you found one! Your class reads an excerpt from the classic, David Copperfield. They answer four comprehension questions and explore context to complete eight fill-in-the-blank vocabulary words. The...

Gosh dictionaries are great, and your class gets to make one of their own. They look up and write down the dictionary definition to nine words related to conservation and pollution prevention. They list their words alphabetically for...

A dictionary is a very helpful tool. Teach your third graders how to locate words, define them, and understand what root words are. They look up 12 words, write their definitions, then determine the root word that helps categorize each...

Learners who have mastered basic pre-reading skills can move on with this emergent reading activity. They view a series of images, then choose digraphs, consonants, and vowels to spell out the name of the object on each card. Tip: This...

This reading activity can be used at a learning center or suggested to parents for reading reinforcement at home. Little learners place a picture card on a magnetic board, they say the name of the object on the card, then sift through...

Emergent readers use a letter cube to identify, blend, and make words. They roll each of the three letter cubes, mark down the letters they rolled, then blend the letter sounds together to make a word. They record each word on a...

There are three spinners to use in this phonic activity. Spinner one contains digraphs, spinner two contains, vowels, and spinner three contains consonants. Learners spin each of the spinners, write down the letters they got, blend them...

Here is a really cool activity that builds early reading and writing skills while allowing learners to differentiate between real and nonsense words. They use the provided pack of alphabet cards to construct basic cvc words. In addition,...