Enhance a unit on historical fiction with an engaging writing lesson. Learners bring the Industrial Era to life as they compose their own historical fiction pieces based on primary source images of Pittsburgh steel workers. 

If you're looking to set your class up for writing effective arguments, try out this idea. While originally created with freedom as a guiding idea, the activity could easily be adapted for other themes. As a class, create a chart of...

Focus on plot and the impact-specific events in The Cay. Class members use their double-entry journals, created in a previous lesson in this series, to record their thinking about the guiding question as they read chapters 15 through 17....

In the tenth instructional activity of this unit, young scholars learn to categorize information as they continue researching their colonial trade. During guided practice, the teacher models how to read informational text slowly while...

Are your beginning readers trying to build fluency? Use this activity to teach them how to monitor their reading fluency. First they get a sentence to practice with, reading it to their partner once and rereading it silently five times....

Conduct a close reading of chapter 9 of The Cay. Read the chapter again and ask pupils to respond to a list of included text-dependent questions. Finish the class with the provided writing assignment, which asks learners to use textual...

They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid's Poems by David Bowles is the focus of a five-week language arts unit unit. Fifth graders listen to various poems and participate in thoughtful discussions, examining vocabulary and learning new words in...

There are so many ways to be smart! Can your class identify their intelligences? The third of five career and college lesson plans designed for sixth graders challenges them to assess their unique skills. Once they determine their...

Use the accompanying assessment to determine your class's prior knowledge on Martin Luther King, Jr. before beginning a activity on the famous civil rights movement leader. The resource has young historians thinking about life for...

A superb interdisciplinary approach highlights this lesson which incorporates space science knowledge and narrative skills. After reading The Magic School Bus, two excellent poems, and watching a video, all about our solar system, young...

Following brief instruction about the Iran Hostage Crisis during Jimmy Carter's presidency, small groups read three-page sections from the diary of hostage Robert C. Ode. They write editorials from the perspective of either U.S. citizens...

As the final lesson plan in a larger beginning-of-the-year unit to establish routines and teach close reading skills, this plan is designed as an assessment piece. Using the story, The Librarian of Basra, learners independently...

This writing pre-assessment has minimal instruction but maximum support and encouragement. It begins with a review of the book, Rain School, through a think-pair-share and small group discussion. The discussion...

Third graders continue to practice the close reading skills of capturing the gist and reading again for important details in the sixth lesson in a larger unit. This is a great beginning-of-the-year unit for establishing visible thinking...

Third graders practice the skills of identifying the main message in a story, describing the main character, and sorting the key details of a story into specific categories. The story they read is, The Boy Who Loved Words. Using a...

Acquaint your class with informational text through a close reading. First, examine a couple of pages together, looking at text features and content. The whole class focuses on marking down a brief summary of each paragraph before...

Reading is fantastic, especially when it's reading about bullfrogs. Kids get cozy with predator/prey relationships as they hone their information-reading skills. They start out as they read a portion of the text aloud, then they...

Look it up. Scholars use a dictionary and thesaurus to verify the meaning of the research vocabulary words they defined in the previous activity. They then use sticky notes to write a synonym for each word. Finally, individuals choose a...

Young historians discover the life of an incredible African American woman who, as an anti-slavery lecturer prior to the Civil War, defied stereotypes of what women could accomplish. Pupils explore the concept of stereotyping, read...

Teach your class about Helen Keller and her accomplishments with a reading comprehension lesson based on A Picture Book of Helen Keller by David A. Adler. As individuals read, they answer discussion questions about Helen Keller...

Building on the previous activity in this series of lesson seeds, this plan focuses on the use of dialect in Theodore Taylor's novel, The Cay. Class members examine specific lines of text, use their reading journals to respond to the...

Encourage your learners to examine the setting in Theodore Taylor's The Cay. Pupils work in small groups to put together a description of the setting before reading two more chapters of the book. They use their double-entry journals to...

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" serves as an exemplar for a mini-instructional activity on semicolons. Working alone or in small groups, class members first circle all the semicolons in the letter, and then...

Readers continue to learn how natural resources are important to Canada's economy. They read, annotate, and answer text-dependent questions about Natural Resources and the Canadian Economy. They then discuss key terms in the text.