Help your youngsters find meaning in the text they read with this series of five intervention lessons. Offering explicit, step-by-step instructions for walking children through shared readings of leveled books, these...

Bridge to Terabithia is a story about friendship that brings magic into ordinary life. Study guides may not be magical, but the guided questions, graphic organizers, extension activities, vocabulary, and discussion questions help...

Provide parents with the tools they need to bridge the summer learning gap with this collection of fun activities. Whether it's creating an alphabet poster with illustrations for each letter, playing a game of sight word concentration,...

Support all young learners on their journey to literacy with this five-lesson reading intervention unit. Following a clearly outlined format, each lesson first engages children in practicing their phonemic awareness and phonics...

Scholars explore the animal kingdom with help from two texts, Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey and A Bed for the Winter by Karen Wallace. The literature and informational text set the learning stage for thoughtful discussion and...

Start a lesson plan on poetic voice with a peer to peer discussion on what characterizes the strength in the voice with which a writer chooses to express himself/herself. In pairs, readers are tasked with reading and creating T-charts...

Chris Van Allsburg's Two Bad Ants provides third graders with an opportunity to examine point of view and how the point of view of others may differ from their own.

The most effective way to support an argument is with clear and relevant evidence. As seventh graders read and listen to Cesar Chavez's California Commonwealth Club Address, they work through five sections of a textual analysis unit,...

This activity may have writers evaluate short compositions, but their subjects are quite tall: great Americans. Pupils read one another's compositions and closely examine how specific phrases and diction contribute to shaping American...

Poison Dart Frog babies are the focus of a lesson that challenges scholars to compare and contrast two informational texts. Beginning with a read-aloud, followed by a discussion, readers complete a practice page that examines the main...

A passage from Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome provides the text for an assessment that asks readers to use evidence from the excerpt to decide if Ethan is a victim of his social and physical environment, or of his own personal choices and...

Cross-comparison, the technique of focusing on two different texts with the same themes, motifs, events, etc., is employed in an exercise that asks groups to examine two different translations of “The Ruin,” a poem, written in Old...

Vivid quotes and strong sensory language compose Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, bringing the women to life as they navigate through issues surrounding identity and maternal relationships. Examine Waverly's relationship with her mother...

Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club brings together the central ideas of identity, ambition, expectations, and relationships. As high schoolers read an excerpt from the chapter "Two Kinds," they note how Jing-Mei's connection to music relates to...

The complex relationship between a teacher and his student takes center stage in an instructional activity that asks readers to pay close attention to how author Ethan Canin introduces his characters and how he develops the character of...

"Three Stones Back," a passage from Matt de la Pena's best-seller, Ball Don't Lie, allows readers to practice their close reading skills as they compare the passage to an information text about wealth inequality. 

Elementary schoolers discover that the world is at their fingertips as they acquire new vocabulary. Several suggested activities and strategies are provided here, building new reading and oral vocabulary. 

Guide your class through reading various versions of The Three Little Pigs. Talk about the traditional story line and then discuss a different point of view: Maybe the wolf was just an innocent bystander! This lesson plan, which has...

Playing team sports is about more than just scoring the most goals or winning the most games. Read this passage with your class and learn how athletes build character as members of a team. When finished, individuals identify the main...

This resource is made up of a series of reading passages with accompanying questions. On the first page, learners read the definitions of both fiction and non-fiction. They examine four short selections before writing either fiction or...

Prepare for a research project or just use this worksheet on its own. Class members choose a topic, write a big question about it, and note down information they find about it. The final product is a longer written assignment in the...

Young scholars participate in a discussion about the book House Hunting, review vocabulary words and are instructed to group words to read smoothly. In this language arts lesson, students complete comprehension questions and write...