Learning to read between the lines, to recognize the on-the-surface meaning as well as the implied or inferred meaning of text, is an important skill for all readers. The materials and activities in this 73-page packet are designed to...

Have you ever read part of a story and had to figure out what the rest was about? Practice making inferences with several short passages and multiple choice questions.

Good literature can be much like an iceberg requiring readers to presume that the bulk of the meaning may be inferred to be found below the surface. Here's a lesson that asks scholars to conduct a close reading of passages from The...

Does Mark Twain’s satire become sarcasm and does he cross the line of propriety in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? As an introduction of satire, class members view an excerpt from The Daily Show and discuss Stewart's use of this...

Learn the moral of the story with a series of activities about Aesop's fables. Focusing on The Contest Between the Sun and the Wind, learners complete a graphic organizer to discuss who, what, how, and why the events occur. Additionally,...

Don't forget to read between the lines! Educators learn tips and activities to help scholars learn to infer to increase reading comprehension. Activities suggested include think alouds, backwards words, and who's who. the packet includes...

What is happening to our newspapers? In the context of the current trends of media and the ever-declining print news industry, this handout includes two political cartoons for pupils to analyze, both created by artists working for...

True passion can drive you mad. Stephen Dedalus, the main character in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man straddles many lines, including those between sanity and insanity, piety and sin, and individuality...

Just read between the lines. Scholars analyze rhetorical devices in Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter by first discussing them with guided questioning. They then complete a rhetorical impact tracking tool before finishing the lesson plan...

The five lessons in this resource are designed to teach class members how to read between the lines, how to use personal experience/background knowledge/schema, along with the information in the text, to make assumptions about...

As part of their study of Out of the Dust, readers create a biopoem for one of the characters in Karen Hesse's 1998 Newbery Medal winning verse novel.

Support second graders with mastering the Common Core using this series of classroom displays. With each English language arts standard rewritten as a We can statement and accompanied by images and examples, this resource provides...

To begin this lesson, class members examine Antonius Hockelmann's painting "Tree Flowers II," record elements of the painting that they notice, and share their observations with a partner. Next, pupils do a close reading of Jericho...

A passage from Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner is the text for a cloze reading activity designed to determine the comprehension skills of class members. The resource includes the activity, an answer key, and step-by-step directions.

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.

The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien's powerful collection of vignettes about the experiences of a platoon of soldiers during the Vietnam War, serves as a text for a crossword puzzle. The 23 clues asks readers to recall characters,...

After finishing The Red Badge of Courage, readers complete a grammar worksheet  to identify the chain of events in the plot, the enduring issues, and major themes of Stephen Crane's novel.

Make The Taming of the Shrew modern and relevant with this outline. Small groups can choose from a list of suggested scenes and update with modern language and settings before acting them out. Great questions refine writing and...

Augment your eighth grade language arts curriculum with a thorough set of reading comprehension activities and assessments. Focusing on a variety of skills, including vocabulary in context, text structure, main idea, and author's style,...

Put your thinking cap on, it's quiz time! Here, scholars use their knowledge of the book, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi to create six questions to be used in their upcoming quiz. 

Look deeper into the text with a reading strategy based on asking critical thinking questions. While reading Reading the Fountain by Kate Klise, learners think of questions that help them describe, compare, associate, analyze,...

Fighting a war over home soil makes a living nightmare even more real. Class members describe the experience of a Civil War soldier during the Battle of Franklin, poised right at a major turning point of the war, after researching the...