Explore the text, Cold and Hot, with comprehension strategies for young readers. First, give them a purpose for reading: find out what the boy wore outside in the snow! Then have them use one-to-one matching and picture clues to...

Walk your pupils through the beginning of My Antonia by Willa Cather with a read-aloud-style activity. The goal is to make predictions and back them up with textual evidence.

Making inferences and drawing conclusions is a key component to successful active reading. Encourage your class to use context clues and prior knowledge to infer different elements of a story, including the setting, plot, and character...

"Who says a pen has to be called a pen? Why not call it a frindle?" Inspired by this quote from the award-winning novel written by Andrew Celements, this lesson allows children to invent their own...

Strap on those backpacks, it's time to travel through history with this literature unit based on the first four books of The Magic Tree House series. While reading through these fun stories, children create story maps, record...

Chris Van Allsburg's Two Bad Ants provides third graders with an opportunity to examine point of view and how the point of view of others may differ from their own.

Kids practice using five types of context clues (definition, synonym, antonym, example, and general) to decode idiomatic language.

Help young readers find the setting in the story. They will review what a setting is with a modeled example by the teacher. After reading The Cow Who Wouldn't Come Down by Paul Brett Johnson and completing a practice sheet,...

With What Do You See at the Pond?, young readers explore pond life and practice reading strategies. Learners first make predictions and then read the simple story independently. After a second read-through with a partner, kids come...

Greed is the theme of the West African folktale, Anansi Goes to Lunch and this multidisciplinary collection of lessons. First, scholars listen to a read aloud and participate in a grand conversation about the book's key details and...

It can be awfully hard teaching young children how to read, but this phonics resource will make the job a little easier. Focusing on the au and aw vowel digraphs, this collection of engaging activities teaches beginning...

Working in pairs, scholars use picture cards to practice segmenting words into phonemes and blending phonemes into words. When a peer answers correctly they place a penny in a treasure chest. Incorrect responses make the card go back in...

An activity challenges scholars to show what they know about onset and rime. Learners choose from a stack of picture cards and give onset and rhyming clues to see if their partners can guess the word they are holding.

Challenge your class with this lesson! Learners read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, discuss context clues, identify main ideas and details, and analyze story elements. Discussion questions and activities are broken down for each chapter...

This fully scripted lesson could be a big help for someone new to teaching Kindergarten. It outlines what you should do and say as you teach grammar and literary elements such as, main character, setting, and events through reading. The...

Segmenting and blending phonemes helps budding readers understand words. Use this strategy in an engaging game where partners test each other's auditory processing using familiar words. Using picture cards and a chart (included),...

Compare and contrast the characters in John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Using a Venn diagram, kids write in different traits to describe each person, and note their shared characteristics in the middle section.

Reinforce inference skills with a learning game! Scholars read scenarios on cards and match them to a written inference on the triangle. The first pupil to match all their inferences wins!

The skill of prediction as a reading strategy is explored. Learners are shown how to use clues within a story, along with pictures, to make predictions as to what's going to happen in the story. A clever in-class game which uses objects...

What does it begin with? In this engaging phonics game, small groups study onset and rime using picture cards. Groups take turns as one player draws three cards from an overturned pile, placing them face-up on the table. They silently...

Have you used the directed reading thinking activity in your classroom? Doubling as either a prereading strategy, or a during reading strategy, it helps readers connect the historical background of the text to the text itself. As the...

Help your pupils discover the power of context clues by teaching the this vocabulary strategy. Designed to go with words from Willa Cather's My Antonia, this exercise focuses on having individuals use their own words to define new...

Here is a unit designed to support English language development. Scholars speak, move, and write to learn more about topics that focus on community and local concepts. The series of lessons aids to reinforce concepts...

Surprise! is the theme of this series of challenge activities. The surprise comes from the information your scholars will discover when researching topics such as alligators and crocodiles, living in other countries, becoming a...