Model for young readers how to make the shift from passive to active reading by making text-to-self and text-to-text connections. After a series of activities that provide guided practice, the focus shifts to making text-to-words...

Fourth graders investigate visual imagery to aid reading comprehension. In this reading strategies lesson, 4th graders discover how visual imagery helps in comprehending a story. Students use a reader's notebook to record connections.

Explore universal themes in literature with a literacy and multicultural awareness lesson plan. Elementary and middle schoolers make real world connections between themes in books from several cultures. They make inferences and locate...

Home in on the quote on this page to explore setting, the author's and character's voices, and plot in Willa Cather's My Antonia. Pupils draw a picture of what is described in the quote, discuss the content, and make connections to their...

Tweens and teens learn coping skills to help manage strong emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness with a lesson that asks them to generate a list of self-calming strategies they use and to consider the suggestions in a short video and...

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...

Your class won't be a bunch of squares from using this well-rounded activity! Instead, they'll be expressing thoughtful questions using the cubing strategy. The class brainstorms questions of increasing rigor about Zach's Lie in the...

Eric Liu's formula "power plus character equals citizenship" and his three strategies to making change happen model for high schoolers how to develop citizen power, how to get involved and participate to make democracy work. Class...

This vocabulary-in-context strategy can be applied to any book that learners read with you; however the activity here is designed around Byron Byrton's fiction book, Airplane. First, introduce the new words you will learn: attendant,...

Clouds come alive when curious minds create rain in an action-packed activity. Scholars view a video of rain and analyze an image of water uses to generate a class discussion leading into a hands-on exploration. Using a set of...

Readers of Wuthering Heights use the DRTA strategy to formulate predictions about the actions of characters in Bronte's novel.

Model for your class members how to use a definition map to make connections between new words and prior knowledge. Although the strategy is designed for social studies classes, the approach can be use at any grade level and in any...

“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...

Designed as a postreading activity for Act II of Cyrano de Bergerac, this resource uses the QAR strategy to get readers thinking deeper about the texts they're reading. Explicit directions for the teacher are included, so don't fret if...

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.

Practice reading strategies using Elizabeti's Doll by Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen. Readers utilize decoding and comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading the story. A detailed list of text features, high frequency words,...

School subjects connect when your young scholars use math to edit English. Math allows you to convert an entire paragraph into a simple equation or inequality. Examples encourage learners to write expressions, equations, and inequalities...

What is it that makes people keep going when they face challenges in life? Ask your class to consider this question in relation to their own experiences and as they read material from The New York Times. Using personal experiences...

Make note of what readers know, what to know, and have learned during a unit on Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. As class members read the book, they jot down their ideas on a KWHL chart, and consider what they have...

Good readers make connections between texts. The SAT regularly assesses the ability to make those connections using paired reading passages, a topic discussed in an official SAT practice lesson plan on synthesis. During the instructional...

Get deep! Teach scholars how to make connections between texts to deepen their understanding of a topic. Using the resource, pupils read and annotate a short informational text about Sudan's Civil War and refugee crisis. Next, they...

Let's make connections! Using the resource, class members make connections between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and their readers theater scripts. To finish, they complete a worksheet to evaluate the role of narration in...

Building on a previous lesson plan, readers continue using context clues to learn new vocabulary. Additionally, they continue working on their Gathering Evidence graphic organizers, making connections between an informational text and A...

With What Do You See at the Pond?, young readers explore pond life and practice reading strategies. Learners first make predictions and then read the simple story independently. After a second read-through with a partner, kids come...