Before your class reads the book James and the Giant Peach, check out this very handy set of learning activities. The reading guide provides you with several excellent ideas for building vocabulary related to the text and reading...

Fourth graders study food chains, producers, consumers, and decomposers. They play a food chain game and create food chain mobiles or posters. They take a nature hike around the school and observe various parts of a food chain.

Text marking and a T-chart format to distinguish important information from trivia help elementary readers summarize effectively. Encouraging readers to construct a chapter summary from paragraph-level topic sentences is another sound...

Learners identify insects living in rotting logs. In this decomposition lesson plan, students observe pieces of a rotting log, they look at the insects that have inhabited the log and create a chart that shows their findings.