Natasha Wing's story The Night Before Thanksgiving is a great way to incorporate rhyme and literature into the Thanksgiving season. Learners make text-to-self connections, recall main events, and choose post-reading activities...

Historical fiction novels give readers a chance to step into someone else's shoes. An educator's guide from Penguin Common Core Lesson Plans provides resources to accompany three historical fiction novels written by Ruta Sepetys: Between...

Students research the Internet, read designated books and selection, participate in discussions and write short reports while completing this series of lessons about slavery and the Underground Railroad. As a final project, they design a...

As part of a reading of Elie Wiesel's Night class members engage in a directed reading/thinking activity that includes crafting predictions, verifying these predictions, and interpreting portions of the text.

Students, assessing a variety of formatting tools with Microsoft Word, utilize a bank of vocabulary words to make a personal dictionary of nouns. They classify nouns for people, places, things and ideas and separate them into common and...

Ribbit ribbit! Hop through a series of activities based on A Tale of Two Frogs. Kids read the Russian folktale and answer reading comprehension questions before working on phonics exercises, tracing dotting lines to make a path...

The historical background for Fever 1793 is the focus of a pre-reading strategy that has class groups rotate through a series of stations stocked with photographs, articles, and other texts that describe the Yellow Fever outbreak of...

A fun and delicious lesson can help your kids learn about plural nouns and story sequencing. After reading The Magic Apple by Rob Cleveland, kids match pictures to story segments and add s to nouns to make them plural....

Readers of Paradise Lost draw parallels between Milton's tale and Gene Zion's Harry the Dirty Dog, an illustrated children's book.

Students read the story, Dear Mr. Henshaw. They build an alarm system for something in the classroom, as the main character Leigh does to protect his lunchbox from thieves. Students explore alarms and use their creativity to create an...

Twelfth graders use computers and the Internet to research a specified area, word processors to prepare an essay, a digital camera, a video camera gather visuals, and a scanner to add visuals to a PowerPoint presentation as they discover...

Class members are asked to consider how they would respond to situations faced by characters in Great Expectations. After completing one exercise as guided practice, individuals are presented with a second problematic situation and...

Learners take a closer look at one journalist's work on UN Peacebuilding efforts in four African nations: Sierra Leone, Burundi, Central African Republic, and Guinea Bissau. They collaborate to define peacebuilding and discuss...

Extend the exhilarating learning experience of Dr. Seuss with five activities designed to reinforce literacy skills—site word reading, dialogue writing, story mapping, and more! Featured stories include The Lorax,...

Are your scholars reading Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee? If so, use this textual analysis packet and lesson guide to drive deeper thinking about the characters, create personal connections, and apply historical...

Waves, currents, crests, and troughs. Using information provided in an article about waves and currents, readers define terms used to describe how energy travels.

Get readers thinking about the major themes in Victor Martinez's award-winning novel, Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida by asking them to agree or disagree with the prompts on an anticipation guide and to discuss...

Considering a college search project? After picking a possible career choice, and determining if that career needs a technical college or university education, individuals examine a wide variety of sources and select three schools...

Why do we read primary source documents? What can they give us that other writings cannot? Provide your learners with any of the primary sources attached here (there are seven), and have them complete the graphic organizer (which opens...

Third graders examine how a family modifies their environment to create a home out of mud. They read the book "This House is Made of Mud" by Ken Buchanan, and write a description of their own home that compares the home of mud to their...

Your clever kindergartners will enjoy a series of activities based on the West African folktale, The Clever Monkey, adapted by Rob Cleveland. They sequence the story with pictures, copy sentences, illustrate idioms about cats,...

Here is a great learning task that focuses on the development of areas in computational fluency including strategies in mental math. Young learners are guided through a list of addition expressions that help them visually understand the...

Though the discrete content here is a pair of New York Times articles about a 1998 military strike on Iraq and the coincident impeachment by the House of Representatives of then-President Clinton, this detailed plan for creating,...

If you're reading the classic story Over in the Meadow, consider this strategy to cover vocabulary in context with budding readers. After a brief introduction, listeners raise a hand when they hear each word (bask,...