US Department of Education
A Close Reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address provides the text for a series of close reading exercises that model for instructors how carefully crafted guiding questions can help readers think critically about what they read, thus developing...
Student Achievement Partners
"The Glorious Whitewasher" from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain with Mini-Assessment
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...
Curated OER
Lyddie: An Instructional Unit Resource Guide
Katherine Paterson’s young adult novel Lyddie is the foundation of a differentiated instruction unit that not only explores the rise of industrialization and labor but women’s rights issues as well. After learners read the novel, they...
Curated OER
"As You Like It" by William Shakespeare
Jacque's soliloquy from Act II, scene ii of As You Like It sets the stage for a close reading exercise that models how to approach difficult, dense text and enables readers to practice reading comprehension and analysis skills. Learners...
Curated OER
The Jacket: Journal Templates Teacher's Guide
Explore this story involving prejudice and racism to enhance learners' comprehension skills. The story The Jacket by Andrew Clements involves an African American boy who is falsely accused of stealing someone's jacket. This teacher's...
Curated OER
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Guide your class on an adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with this Hampton-Brown outline. It provides educators with a guide to increase reading comprehension, critical thinking, literary analysis, and reading strategies. This...
Dr. Seuss Enterprises
Dr. Seuss in the Classroom
Explore the works of Dr. Seuss, such as Horton Hears a Who, Horton Hatches and Egg, The Sneetches and Other Stories, The Lorax, The Butter Battle Book, and Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. Each story lesson includes reading...
Curated OER
Basil Heatter, "The Long Night of the Little Boats"
“It was a miracle.” Basil Heatter’s “The Long Night of the Little Boats,” which details the miraculous rescue of the British army from the shores of Dunkirk in 1940, is featured in a series of exercises that ask class members to read,...
Curated OER
Using Words as a Way into Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief
Use the Visual Thesaurus to predict the subject matter of Rick Riordan's book The Lightning Thief. A pre-reading activity encourages middle schoolers to use context clues and word meaning to discover what the book is about. After they...
Curated OER
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Discuss the life of Franklin D. Roosevelt. This story, called "Franklin D. Roosevelt" by Laura Hamilton Waxman, is used to explore comprehension skills. Some of these skills include identifying prefixes and suffixes, making comparisons,...
Curated OER
The Summer of the Swans
The Summer of the Swans, by Betsy Byars, is a 160-page chapter book about a family going through a difficult time. Complement your reading of Byars' book with this detailed outline of each chapter. Every section includes comprehension...
Curated OER
Unforgettable...
Middle and high schoolers remember their most memorable experiences, and then connect their own narrative with an exposition about the topic associated with their experience. This New York Times lesson plan would be a great addition to...
Northeast Georgia Regional Educational Service Agency
Who Were the Tired, the Poor, the Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free?
Elvira Woodruff's The Orphan of Ellis Island: A Time Travel Adventure is the core text in a interdisciplinary unit study of immigration at the turn of the century.
Curated OER
Information Shuffle
Gather some information, print it onto sentence strips, and then have your class physically shuffle the cards to better understand the importance of organizational patterns in writing. Middle school learners examine information for a...