Want to boost your readers' comprehension skills and strategies? Look to these five pages, each with a short story and questions to answer covering main idea, facts, sequence of events, context clues, conclusions, and making...

Characters and events in The Crucible provide the clues for a crossword puzzle that asks readers to demonstrate their knowledge of Arthur Miller's allegorical play.

Jeannette Walls' memoir, The Glass Castle, grapples with the idea that loving someone may or may not include forgiving them for their past behavior. Take a look at a crossword puzzle that reviews characters, plot points, and key details...

Time for a good old fashioned match game! Readers complete an initial, second, and third read of Plantation Life to gain a deep understanding. After close reading the text, scholars practice identifying paraphrasing by...

Stay gold with a handy crossword puzzle based on S.E. Hintont's The Outsiders. As middle and high schoolers work on completing the worksheet, they review key concepts and quotes from the book.

Apply the spelling rule about adding suffixes to words ending with a vowel followed by a consonant with your class. Spellers read the rules and examples, observe words with suffixes, and write the root words. They write 6 answers.

“There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night.” Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest,” which may or may not have been the first chapter of the original Dracula manuscript, is the focus of a Directed Reading Thinking Activity...

Have your pupils buzz along and find all of the words in this grid! The words are related to Hi! Fly Guy by Tedd Arnold, so this would be a great resource to use alongside a reading of one of the Fly Guy books.

Encourage healthy eating, cooking, and goal setting with a word search that showcases a variety of fruits and vegetables, and provides a four-step plan to eat more of them. 

Get the word out about friendship, support, and a safe school community with a media literacy lesson about bullying. Young journalists investigate instances of bullying and take descriptive pictures as they compile a magazine to fight...

Get to know the computer program, Microsoft Word, by completing 24 tasks, including typing a line of text, experimenting with format options, inserting page numbers, headers, footers, and more.  

It's all about a bit of give and take. Scholars silently read War in the Pacific and circle any unfamiliar words. Using context clues, they write each word on a strip of paper along with the inferred definition. After looking the word up...

A land with no trees. Scholars analyze the text The Inuit Thought of It: Amazing Arctic Innovations and discuss the word landscape. They imagine what it would be like living on a land with no trees. At the end, individuals work in...

Can you find the themes from Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in other books? What about picture books? Compare the novel to a picture book with a lesson about making predictions and finding textual evidence.

Kids learn best when asking questions about what they have read. Encourage active reading with a comprehension activity based on S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, in which kids read passages from the beginning of the book and identify...

Direct readers' thinking with a DRTA activity that asks them to make predictions about The Book Thief based on an examination of the cover of Markus Zusak's novel and a reading of the prologue.

Designed for teachers, this 12-page packet uses passages from Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace" to model how to design activities that encourage close reading of complex text.

What's the buzz these days? Learn some fun and interesting facts about honeybees with an informational reading passage, including the steps for successful pollination and honey creation.

Jane Hirshfield's poem "My Skeleton" asks readers to pause and think about the amazing, often taken-for-granted structure that protects and gives form to human bodies. After observing the human skeleton's image, class members read the...

Scholars use a map of Asia to help them better understand the article "The Vietnam Wars," focusing on word meaning in the title and subtitle. Learners then use guided notes while reading the article and discuss their ideas with partners.

That was heroic!  Scholars quickly look over What is a Hero to determine and discuss the structure of the text. They then read the introduction and Act 1 closely to find the gist and annotate the text. They circle unfamiliar words...

Are all criminals bad people? Pupils answer this and other compelling questions in an anticipation guide for The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. Designed for learners to complete before reading the text, the...

Are you enjoying the use of all five senses? Imagine that you have to lose one of them; you can choose which one, but it's gone forever. Work through a lesson based on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis that asks class...

After reading The Great Gatsby, groups return to the text and note passages where Fitzgerald uses symbols and color imagery in his narrative. They then develop a presentation that explains the context, the implications, and possible...