Curated OER
Express Yourself Lesson Seed 15: Theme
Build understanding of theme with an activity designed for The Cay and the Common Core. Small groups or pairs use graphic organizers to determine themes, find and record related details from the text, and formulate theme statements. In...
EngageNY
Grade 9 ELA Module 2, Unit 3, Lesson 12
As the first in a two-part, end-of-unit assessment that encourages readers to synthesize the unit's main ideas, class members review their notes for each of the three texts they read and develop three open-ended discussion questions...
Curated OER
The Lightning Thief: During Reading Strategy
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...
EngageNY
Grade 12 ELA Module 2
The second module in a series for high school seniors focuses on tracking the central idea of a text across genres and from multiple author and character perspectives. Twelfth graders read a speech by Benazir Bhutto entitled "Ideas Live...
Writing Educators Symposium
Asking the Right Questions
It can be difficult to find the theme of a book or story if you don't know the questions to ask. Teach your kids to discern the universal theme in works of literature with a set of activities that promote critical thinking and...
Roald Dahl
The Twits - Muggle-Wump Has an Idea
If a bar of chocolate was on the floor, would you try to pick it up? What if it was covered with glue? The eighth lesson in an 11-part unit designed to accompany The Twits by Roald Dahl has scholars imagine crazy scenarios. The...
Alabama Learning Exchange
The Big Bang Theory: An Evidence-Based Argument
What evidence supports the big bang theory? Individuals analyze scholarly resources about the the theory and develop arguments backed by evidence. They brainstorm, share ideas, watch a video, and read articles to complete a graphic...
Curated OER
“The Story of an Hour” Extension Activities: Teacher’s Guide and Notes
Enhance and extend instruction of "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin with one or all of these ideas. You might want to cover characterization and summary, or improve understanding of context clues and irony. You can cover any...
Roald Dahl
The Twits - The House, the Tree and the Monkey Cage
A house with no windows and a garden full of stinging nettles make the perfect home for Mr. and Mrs. Twit. The seventh instructional activity in an 11-part unit designed to accompany The Twits by Roald Dahl takes a closer look at...
EngageNY
Grade 10 ELA Module 2: Unit 3, Lesson 1
Scholars examine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and analyze the ideas in the preamble. Readers define new vocabulary words, listen to a Masterful Reading, answer questions in pairs, participate in a jigsaw discussion, and...
Learning for Justice
Mary McLeod Bethune
Young historians conduct a close reading of the text of an interview with Mary McLeod Bethune, the daughter of former slaves who taught herself to read, grew up to establish schools for other Black women, and went on to become an advisor...
Polk Bros Foundation
Preview Reading
Scanning a text before getting started is a reading strategy that your pupils can use to get a general idea about a text before diving in. Give some direction to their scanning with a worksheet that includes items to check for and space...
EngageNY
Close Reading and Gathering Evidence from Frightful’s Mountain and “Welcome Back”
Where did the falcons go? Scholars read the article Welcome Back which describes the disappearance of falcons due to the use of pesticides. During a second read, learners annotate the text by marking unfamiliar words and facts about...
EngageNY
Launching Frightful’s Mountain: Building Background Knowledge and Establishing Reading Routines
Welcome to Frightful's Mountain. The teacher introduces scholars to the text Frightful’s Mountain by reading the first chapter aloud. Learners then talk with a partner about the text. The instructor models answering focus questions...
EngageNY
Clarifying Thinking on Water Management: Revisiting the Gallery Walk
One, two, three, go! Scholars gather in triads and number themselves one to three. Each number is responsible for sharing a section of the map homework completed the night before as learners discuss domain-specific vocabulary terms using...
EngageNY
Mid-Unit Assessment: Research
Middle assessment for the Middle Ages. Scholars complete a mid-unit assessment by reading and answering questions about three different text pertaining to the Middle Ages. Learners work independently on the assessment for the class period.
PBS
Interviewing: The Art of Asking Questions
Interviewing skills are important, even outside of a news reporter's desk or employer's office. Take your class through the process of interviewing people they don't know with a set of case studies featuring journalists and various...
Curated OER
The Important Thing About Reading
Third through fifth graders discover the importance of reading and plan a service project to provide books to children. First, they read the book The Important Book and then they brainstorm about the importance of reading. Afterward,...
Curated OER
Let's Find the Main Ideas!
Third graders examine how finding the main ideas and summarizing increases their reading comprehension. They read "The Sea in Danger" while applying the six rules of summarization in a modeled lesson. Next, working in small groups, they...
Curated OER
Let's Get the Facts!
Young scholars observe and demonstrate the process of summarization. They discuss the three steps of summarization, then silently read a National Geographic Kids News article. As a class they complete a semantic map of the article, and...
Curated OER
Story Summaries; The Three Little Pigs
Students explore language arts by completing a graphic organizer in class. In this story structure lesson plan, students read the classic tale "The Three Little Pigs" and discuss the main characters, conflict and setting. Students...
Polk Bros Foundation
Illustration Planner
One way to help your pupils more fully understand an idea from the text they are reading is to require them to draw or sketch the concept. This page provides some space to plan the details your students want to include in their...
East Stroudsburg University
In Your Own Words... Paraphrasing
How can you put a passage in your own words without changing the meaning of the original text? That is the question facing many young researchers. The advice modeled in this presentation is that writers read the passage carefully,...
Maine Content Literacy Project
Exploring Text with the iMovie Application
Get your class going on one of the final assessments for a unit on short stories by introducing iMovie and its main features. In this tenth lesson in a series of fourteen, pupils take some time to explore iMovie before conducting an...