The odds that readers will enjoy a summer reading project will be in your favor if you choose Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games as the anchor text. The richly detailed plans included in this resource make it easy to volunteer...

A confidential message written by Thomas Jefferson provides readers with an opportunity to practice their reading comprehension skills. The resource, part of a series, includes questions that require a close reading of the message and a...

The Scarlet Letter may be a classic, but keeping high schoolers engaged in the reading of Hawthorne's vocabulary, syntax, imagery, and historical references presents it own set of challenges. Here's a guide that offers readers...

Scholars take part in two exercises to boost their knowledge of personification. After reading a detailed description and excerpts from famous poems, writers list action verbs and objects then combine words to create a humorous...

Should people be able to ban books from schools and libraries if they find them objectionable? Scholars read the three main pros and cons regarding banned books. They also review a list of the top 10 challenged books from 2017 and...

Review concepts and terms after reading Running Out of Time. Learners each come up with a few terms that they think are important and then participate in a list-group-label exercise, paying close attention to the two main years featured...

Reinforce important reading skills with a set of vocabulary lesson plans. Middle schoolers complete sentences, play word games, finish analogies, and build their growing vocabulary with a packet of helpful and applicable graphic organizers.

"Everybody is guilty of something." As class members continue their close reading of Walter Mosley's essay, they examine how Mosley develops and supports his central ideas about Western civilization's relationship to guilt.

Support young learners as they expand their cultural awareness with this list of children's literature on countries from around the globe. Including both fictional and non-fictional texts. This resource will help...

A list of 11 books about paleontology offers titles, authors, and a brief description of the tale.

Conduct a lesson that leads into a writing assessment. After reading an excerpt from From Seed to Pumpkin, first graders demonstrate their interpretation of sections of the passage by sketching the details from each part.

A fiction and nonfiction text, The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest by Lynne Cherry and I See a Kookaburra! Discovering Animal Habitats Around the World by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page begins a learning experience in...

Here is a nice set of activities and discussion questions to accompany your class reading of No Pretty Pictures, a memoir of a young girl's experiences and struggle for survival during the Holocaust.

Bully, bullied, or bystander? Paul Langan's The Bully is the anchor text in a unit that examines bullying and violence. After a close reading of the text, readers imagine themselves as the characters and consider how they would react in...

Augment your unit on Carl Hiaasen's Hoot with a series of activities about the environment, civil disobedience, making an impact in the world, and growing up. A list of literary concepts and themes helps you to write your lessons to...

Class members listen to a masterful reading of Act 1, Scene 1, lines 203-236 of Romeo and Juliet and then break into groups to examine how Shakespeare uses figurative language to develop Romeo's idealized concept of beauty.

Teenagers get the real information about marijuana use based on the history of tobacco legislation and research. As they read an educational passage about marijuana laws, science, and changing attitudes, they address their preconceptions...

Once your scholars know their letter sounds and recognize them in words, have them try making new words by manipulating phonemes. Pupils are given a word change picture board and a stack of word pictures. They pick a card and place it...

Readers of Neal Shusterman's young adult science fiction novel, Unwind, record what they know, what they want to know, how the will find answers to the questions, on a KWHL chart.

What was everyday life like in Colonial Virginia? To find the answer cooperative groups work collaboratively to read an informational handout and complete a graphic organizer. The speaker of the group then shares their new-found...

Rafael Trujillo was president of the Dominican Republic in the 1930s. Pupils read and analyze the first six paragraphs of Julia Alvarez's autobiographical essay "A Genetics of Justice," in which the author describes Trujillo's impact on...

Listening to poems about feeling lonely and feeling like an outsider set the stage for a group activity that focuses on Stevie Smith's "Not Waving But Drowning." Groups examine the three stanzas of Smith's poem separately and identify in...

Give your class a taste of the Common Core with a practice test that includes both literary and informational reading passages. Pupils respond to related multiple choice questions and longer written response questions. See the...

Prepare your pupils for Common Core testing with this practice test. The test includes one fictional text and four informational texts for learners to read and answer questions about. Also included are answer keys, an online version, and...