Find the author's purpose in this review worksheet. Fourth graders read each of the three following paragraphs and decide whether the author's purpose is to persuade, inform, or entertain. You could use this activity as a class...

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same. . .” After concluding Fever 1793 class members engage in a reading strategy that asks them to connect their thoughts about the self-reliance theme in...

Setting financial goals is a common occurrence in middle school that your learners can practice using this activity. They will be able to solve for how many hours Seth needs to work to save up for a skateboard, helmet, and trip. The...

A passage about bartering practiced by early Native American tribes provides the text for a reading comprehension worksheet that asks kids to use information from the article to answer a series of comprehension questions.

The dry Oklahoma landscape in America's Dust Bowl sent many farmers in search of the promised land. A teacher's guide to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath discusses the characters' desire for a better home along with other themes...

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Ambrose Bierce’s short story, is used to model how structural moves, the decisions an author makes about setting, point of view, time order, etc., can be examined to reveal an author’s purpose. Groups...

Pink and Say, a picture book by Patricia Polacco, and an anticipation guide, set the stage for a reading of Mississippi Trial, 1955, Chris Crowe's novel based on the true story of the murder of Emmett Till. Instructional routines, the...

Zora Neal Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou are featured in a guided inquiry unit. High schoolers research the lives and works of these and other Black women writers and craft an argument, using evidence from their research, to...

We chew with our teeth every day, but how much do we really know about them? Allow Ms. Frizzle to teach your kids a thing or two about teeth. Kids complete a prereading exercise, read the book, and respond to several prompts about the...

Take an in-depth look at a passage from Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn-Dixie. Included here is the reading passage as well as a step-by-step procedure for reading the text, a set of text-dependent questions, and a final writing...

What do you think sheep might be able to barter when they don't have quite enough to buy a gift? Your pupils can find out this and much more during this lesson plan about Sheep in a Shop, spending, saving, and bartering.

Jacque's soliloquy from Act II, scene ii of As You Like It sets the stage for a close reading exercise that models how to approach difficult, dense text and enables readers to practice reading comprehension and analysis...

Second graders make predictions about reading.  In this remedial reading lesson, 2nd graders read a favorite author's story, and read about an animal or favorite hobby or how-to.  Students discuss the various purposes for...

Youngsters learn the meaning of saving and how to reach savings goals by first reading a story of a young Ugandan girl who is gifted a goat, and then discovering the opportunity costs of savings decisions made by her and her family.

Reciting poetry is a great way to build oral language skills and build classroom community. Pupils look at the text elements of poetry and choose a poem to read aloud. They focus on rhythm, fluency, and expression. This is a great way to...

Before you begin your unit on William Shakespeare's The Tempest, introduce the themes of the play with a lesson based on the biblical story of Joseph. Taking your high schoolers through selected text from Genesis 17-44,...

Circles are the foundation of many geometric concepts and extensions - a point that is thoroughly driven home in this extensive unit. Fundamental properties of circles are investigated (including sector area, angle measure, and...

Ezell Blair, Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil changed history. Their sit-in at the lunch counter of the Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1, 1960 became a model for the nonviolent protests that...

Practice the strategy of summarizing to gain meaning and knowledge from an informational text. Young readers highlight supporting details and main ideas, and then they use this to summarize two articles: "The Great Quake" and "What...

To prepare for a reading of Robert Cormier's Tunes for Bears to Dance to, kids research vocabulary drawn from the novel and share their findings with their groups.

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.

How do you solve for an unknown angle? For this sixth installment of a 36-part series, young mathematicians use concepts learned in middle school geometry to set up and solve linear equations to find angle measures.

Students write their thoughts about the value of reading and of Akron launching a city wide reading campaign. Students also research literacy in their own community, finding out how it compares to Akron's statistics where it has been...

Tween find out what it means to give and get respect. After reviewing the Recipe for Relationships studied in a previous lesson, groups create a dramatization of two-minute scenario in which an individual behaves inappropriately in a...