Help primary school pupils learn valuable reading strategies. As they choral read a poster or big book, they predict covered words and learn various reading strategies for figuring out an unknown word. This will help them gain an...

Alphabet insects! Who has ever heard of such a thing? Get ready because your class is going to research insects that start with a specific letter of the alphabet. In small groups, they'll use the Internet and reference texts to locate...

How can you tell if a number of items is reasonable? Combine math and language arts with a fun instructional activity based on Jeff Shepard's The Right Number of Elephants. After reading the book, kids discuss amounts of other...

In this family comic book worksheet, students examine examples of comic strips about families. They plan and draw their own 3 panel family comic strip using drawing tools. They investigate more about drawing comic strips by visiting a...

This outlines steps for reviewing chapters 9-12 of The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleishman. Small groups read the chapters together and then clarify any confusing parts. The class compares 2 different letters to determine which is better...

Help your class understand Autism. They conduct research into how the brain is effected by the disorder of autism. Then they write a letter to the Center For Disease Control about their findings and forward some of the new research to them.

A useful scaffold to help your class with character analysis and text interpretation. Questions about characters from Sparrow Hawk Red by Ben Mikaelsen guide your young readers to describe a character literally, along with interpreting...

Fifth graders create a class Powerpoint presentation of historical figures. They each research six names for their assigned alphabet letter and include a thumbnail sketch for the persons. Students present the finished project to other...

Amateur poets explore alphabetical poetry. They choose a topic and brainstorm vocabulary that relates to the topic using each letter of the alphabet. The class then generates ideas for a group alphabet poem. After creating one as a whole...

Readers create a literary scrapbook for one of the characters in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and fill it with mementoes, journal entries, letters, etc. A great way to get kids to think about characterization.

Students explore the story of the Gingerbread Man, and compare the story's neighbors and neighborhoods with those of their school. They bake Gingerbread Friends cookies, retell the story, take a neighborhood walk, and create a class book.

Reading snail mail is a great way to go back into history and to understand others' points of view. The resource, the second in a five-part unit, covers the Dreyfus Affair. Scholars, working in two different groups, read one letter and...

Practice blending letters together to make the words learners are reading. They decode words familiarized with the concept of blending. This lesson utilizes the Body-Coda method of blending developed by Lloyd Eldredge. Each child...

Should Charlie undergo an operation to increase his intelligence? A mini-lesson for a unit on Daniel Keyes novel Flowers for Algernon uses a RAFT activity, which prompts learners to write a letter to Charlie's doctors explaining why they...

Familiarize your class with commonly used editing marks. They apply the use of editing marks to a letter and examine different types of literary tools before making a note card resource for the tools. They add their own examples for each...

Provide parents with the tools they need to bridge the summer learning gap with this collection of fun activities. Whether it's creating an alphabet poster with illustrations for each letter, playing a game of sight word concentration,...

Friendship is the theme in this series of extra support lessons. With a variety of resources (practice worksheets, letter, word, punctuation and picture cards), young readers gain knowledge of initial consonants v and h, blending short...

Young learners compare healthy foods to junk foods. They examine the growing process of a vegetable from a seed all the way to maturity. The book, The Magic School Bus in a Pickle is used. Some nice cross-curricular activities in math,...

Students read "The Green Truck Garden Giveaway" and explore the hobby of gardening. After observing illustrations in the book, students predict possible events in the story. They discuss gardening and write a story about a community...

Primary readers read books in order to practice word recognition, rhyming, and play reading games. They will "read" simple books to reinforce basic reading skills in order to create a foundation. Readers are available to print out along...

Before beginning F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, create a historical context of the Roaring 20s with this activity. Set up a gallery walk with the provided PowerPoint, which features 10 topics related to the 1920s. Then...

Support young learners with developing their spelling skills and ready fluency with this simple graphic organizer. Focusing on the four consonant digraphs /th/, /ch/, /sh/, and /wh/, students dig through their independent reading books...

How do we determine how much information to include and what can be left out? By playing a game of 20 questions, the class generates the best strategies for finding a number. They then move on to guessing the next letter in a short...

Learn more about Kwanzaa with a celebratory instructional activity. As learners analyze My First Kwanzaa Book by Debbi Chocolate, they compare and contrast the celebration to other holiday traditions they know about. Next, they...