Looking to introduce some text-based questions into your ELA lessons? Practice the kinds of skills the Common Core demands with the seven text-based questions and the essay prompt provided here. Designed to be a three-day lesson, day one...

Provide young scholars with the tools they need to succeed with this reference on the Cornell note-taking strategy. By breaking the content of lessons into main ideas, supporting details, and overall summaries, students are...

Students summarize a selected piece od nonfiction text. After reviewing the correct way to read silently, students read a nonfiction article concerning Thanksgiving. They write a summary paragraph using the five step process outlined by...

Set up your class to read Esperanza Rising, by Pam Munoz Ryan, through a class read-aloud and exploration of the setting. The detailed lesson plan outlines each step. First, class members read over the first few pages and focus on the...

Encourage scholars to retell their favorite short story or folktale, adding personal details to make it their own. After reading their book of choice several times, story tellers retell a tale verbally to their classmates. 

Five scientists and their contributions to modern cell theory are listed, one person per slide.  It concludes by having viewers answer recap questions. This simple presentation can be used on the first day of your unit on cells...

Students practice summarizing what they have read. They review the meaning of comprehension. Students go through the steps needed in order to summarize a passage. They pick out the main parts/ideas of what they have read. Students...

Students discuss the importance of comprehension and the use of summarization. Through guided practice, they follow five steps in finding and highlighting important information, while deleting information that is not needed. They write...

This scripted lesson suggests using the journalist’s five W’s (who, what, when, where, why) to teach readers how to summarize a story and to how to distinguish between significant and supporting details. A template and rubric are...

Introducing exponential equations means learners need to take all the rules and tricks they learned for exponents and actually apply them. This presentation comes to the rescue by touching on changing bases in exponential...

Is your city's history a mystery to your class? Ever wonder if your county contains a bounty of folklore? Young computer scientists incorporate technology with time-honored tales during a project with both individual and group...

Students review the concept of silent reading. Through modeling and guided practice, they explore five steps/rules of summarizing. In groups, they read an article and then, using the summarization rules and skills, write an effective...

Students explore how mathematical data is used to summarize and illustrate everyday life. They apply mathematical concepts and skills to analyze data. Students conduct a five question survey of 50 people or more and graph the data.

Can your class sum up a text in a few sentences? Help them build this skill by starting nice and slow. For this summarizing activity, the teacher marks the main ideas with sticky notes. Learners read and reread the text, pausing at the...

Students summarize a selected piece of text nonfiction text. After reviewing the correct way to highlight important information, students read a nonfiction article. They write a summary paragraph using the five step process outlined by...

Scholars apply prior knowledge of statistics to write a conclusion. They summarize using correct academic language and tell the story of the data.

Maintain a positive atmosphere in your math class with this fun lesson on adding and subtracting integers. After first explaining the rules for combining positive and negative numbers, this resource uses a comic strip...

Get a line on the snakes. The assessment task requires the class to determine the species of unknown snakes based upon collected data. Individuals analyze two scatter plots and determine the most likely species for five...

Is there another way to view whether the data is linear or not? Class members work alone and in pairs to create scatter plots in order to determine whether there is a linear pattern or not. The exit ticket provides a quick way to...

Students are introduced to strategies that they can use to summarize text. After reading an article, they use five steps to accurately summarize the material to share with the class. They also review what it means to comprehend what...

After analyzing and evaluating news summaries found in the New York Times "Week in Review" section, middle schoolers study the steps for summarizing a news article briefly and accurately. They write two news summaries: one on a newspaper...

Students, while silently reading the book, "Mr. Pilling's Pond," by Patricia Nikolina Clark, and "One Good Turn," by Bette Anne Rieth, discuss how to summarize each book. They review the five steps to summarization and write them down.

Young scholars summarize a selected piece of text nonfiction text. After reviewing the correct way to read silently, students read a nonfiction article. Working in groups, they write a summary paragraph using the five step process...

Third graders summarize a selected piece of nonfiction text. After reviewing the correct way to use a Venn diagram, 3rd graders read a nonfiction article. They write a summary paragraph using their Venn Diagram and the five-step process...