Weaving is an important part of Navajo culture. Read The Goat in the Rug to your fourth and fifth graders, and give them a glimpse into the process of rug making from the point of view of a goat! They will learn new vocabulary words and...

Theodore Roosevelt's "The Man in the Arena" speech not only provides individuals with a chance to develop their reading skills but also provides much food for thought about current political situations. Cynics, fops, and...

Sail with Christopher Columbus on a biographical reading adventure. Young explorers learn about the life of Sir Columbus as they hone their comprehension skills through guiding questions, shared reading, and fluency practice. Included in...

A unit designed for kindergarteners builds letter-sound correspondence in preparation for reading. Over four weeks, young scholars build proficiency in recognizing and matching the sound of 9 letters. They take that knowledge to read a...

Have you used the directed reading thinking activity in your classroom? Doubling as either a prereading strategy, or a during reading strategy, it helps readers connect the historical background of the text to the text itself. As the...

Develop and strengthen reading comprehension strategies through this comprehensive teaching guide. Your learners will practice making text connections, inferences, predictions, and more using reading passages from the teen-appropriate...

Eleventh graders listen to a brief history lesson about the 40's and 50's mid-West America and the Migrant workers that worked the fields. Next, learners will read a short story written by Tomas Rivera (both in Spanish and English)....

Learners of all ages read and discuss books about Asian America. In this Asian-America lesson plan, different books for every age group are listed and various teaching strategies are suggested. Great tips cover virtually every grade level!

Students gain a strong foundation for reading, writing, and using nonfiction through this instructional activity. They gain an awareness and general understanding what text structures are. Students also identify and interpret what...

Learners practice their fluency skills. In this fluency lesson, students read aloud stories to their peers and they help to coach one another on their fluency, pronunciation, phrasing, and inflection. They discuss what makes a good...

Do you know what a fallacy is? Discuss this term and its meaning with your class. Then, talk about why making generalizations about a large group of people isn't the best thing to do. As a group, study the included letter excerpt. It...

After reading "Fire and Ice," have your class answer these seven thought-provoking questions. Some questions ask readers to connect with the text while others require the learner to reference the text in order to provide an answer. 

Teach learners to reflect on their reading with a lesson about double-entry journals. As they read Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, class members note interesting passages from the text on the left side of their...

Collaborate with your class after reading William Shakespeare's The Tempest with a group labeling activity. As you note key concepts or words from the play on the board, class members suggest associations and connections...

Round out your unit on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis with a series of reading comprehension questions. As kids read, they challenge each other to answer specific connection questions from the text.

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.

Plants prefer classical music to rock and roll. That's one of the claims in an informational passage that makes up part of a set of standardized assessment questions. The set is part of a larger collection of English language arts tests...

The anticipation guide for Words by Heart is the first of a series of six, contains lesson plans for the activity as well as a handout to be completed individually, in pairs, or as a class. It sparks interest for the text...

Middle school years can be tough. An educator's guide for the works of Lynda Mullaly Hunt introduces readers to two texts that discuss the struggles pre-teens face during middle school. Chapter-by-chapter questions and activities for two...

How might different authors approach the same topic? Scholars read a paragraph from an informational text about Canadian refugees using the resource. Next, they participate in a jigsaw activity to connect real-life refugees' experiences...

How affected is Thinks Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe's personal biography? Using a four corners strategy, and evidence from their readings, class members debate the degree of biographical influence in Achebe's novel.

Explore a variety of fables to learn life's lessons through engaging stories. Add rigor to the learning process with activities that include matching a a fable to the story's moral, short answer exit slips, and a three-column graphic...

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...

Did the United States Constitution uphold the institution of slavery, or did it help to destroy it? Young historians study Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution and evaluate the rights of slaveowners as they compared to...