“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same. . .” After concluding Fever 1793 class members engage in a reading strategy that asks them to connect their thoughts about the self-reliance theme in...

Making predictions is an excellent reading strategy. Work on building this into your pupils' toolkit of strategies by trying out the process outlined here for reading the very beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The...

Teach your readers strategies for breaking down informational texts. Pupils develop and implement the tools they'll need to decode texts for the rest of their lives with an informational resource that focuses on the structure and...

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...

Close reading doesn't mean to literally read text close to your face, but rather to pay attention to particular details in order to develop a deep and purposeful understanding of text. The first part of a five-part resource provides an...

Readers use Bloom's Taxonomy to create multi-level questions about Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. 

Readers of Neal Shusterman's young adult science fiction novel, Unwind, record what they know, what they want to know, how the will find answers to the questions, on a KWHL chart.

This pre-reading activity will certainly make your class ponder. With five questions to reflect upon, get insight to the moral dilemma Percy faced in the novel Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. 

Readers respond to a series of questions focused onJuliet Marillier's young adult novel Wildwood Dancing, and crafted to reflect the levels in Bloom's Taxonomy.

Only a thorough understanding of history can save us from repeating it. Practice close reading skills with an eighth grade unit that focuses on 19th century America, including European immigration into Ellis Island and Frederick...

Readers of The House of the Scorpion try to stump their teacher in a QAR questioning game. Pairs craft Right There, Think and Search, On Your Own, and the Author and You questions and the class members then take turns responding to...

After reading up to page 371 of Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, get insight into how Percy felt making a major decision through active discussion strategies that enable both academic...

A four corners pre-reading activity introduces class members to the major themes in Victor Martinez's award winning novel, Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida.

Introduce your freshmen to reading comprehension strategies and key literary elements with a year's worth of lessons and exercises. Each lesson focuses on a specific literary device and includes a definition of the term, a passage that...

Help your class examine humanity's unpredictable nature through "Life Steps Almost Straight." Learners read various works from philosophers such as Viktor Frankl, The Buddha, and Nietzsche to gather textual evidence and explain their...

Chapter 12 of The Hobbit provides the text for an exercise that asks readers to use the QAR strategy to develop and respond to questions about story.

Readers of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth craft and answer "Right There," "Think and Search," "On Your Own," and "Author and You" questions.

Give your guided reading lesson plan a boost with a sample lesson plan designed to reinforce academic content covered in previous assessments. The sample plan describes how the story and activities were chosen and offers the...

John Knowles' A Separate Peace provides readers with an opportunity to develop their close reading and analytical skills as they look for what Knowles feels are the factors that shape our identity.

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...

Challenge readers to read closer in an activity based on the Socratic questioning strategy. As kids read Antoine de Saint Éxupery's The Little Prince, they use sentence starters to ask deeper questions about the text, and...

Take your guided reading lesson plans to the next level with a collection of printables, templates, and reference tools equipped to support the reading needs of your readers. Included is a detailed information page, grouping sheet,...

After completing Nightjohn, Gary Paulsen's young adult novel about slavery set shortly before the Civil War, readers respond to a series of questions crafted to reflect Bloom's taxonomy.

The Amazon Horned Frog is the focus of a activity designed to encourage readers to ask and answer questions. A frog-themed poem opens the door to a whole-group discussion. Following a read-aloud of an informational text, a three-page...