Theodore Roosevelt's "The Man in the Arena" speech not only provides individuals with a chance to develop their reading skills but also provides much food for thought about current political situations. Cynics, fops, and...

The American Revolution is the theme of a five-week unit that focuses on reading, grammar, morphology, and writing. Scholars read and respond to texts, practice spelling and word work, and write paragraphs. Assessments gauge comprehension.

Imagine being one of the painters in 1910 at the Lyme Art Colony in Connecticut. Using the Florence Griswold Museum's on-line resources to gather information about the daily life of artists at the boardinghouse, learners write a letter...

A reading activity boosts scholars' level of fluency while reading connected text. Working collaboratively, pairs read a word list three times and a specific text while their partner gauges their accuracy and speed.

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,...

Focus on chapter two of Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science with a questioning activity. After teaching and modeling several types of questions, learners work with partners and then independently to answer and...

Readers consider comparisons between the Dinka and Nuer tribes in South Sudan, making connections between an informational article about Sudanese tribes and the novel A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park. They annotate the text to help...

Learning to recognize the importance of the features of information text (i.e., titles, subtitles, endnotes, sidebars, etc.) is the focus of a reading activity designed for middle schoolers. Learners examine how these text features...

Do students really need to be taught how to read cartoons, comic books, and comic strips? Yes. Just as they need to learn how to read other forms of graphic text such as diagrams, photos, timetables, maps, charts, and tables. Young...

Scholars continue making connections between the article "Sudanese Tribes Confront Modern War" and A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park. They talk with partners to discuss how the article helps them understand a character's point of...

Introduce your class to encoding text. Pairs work together to create a protocol to send text prior to learning ASCII encoding. Groups then collaborate to send and translate ASCII codes creating a formatted text message. 

We need to talk. Learners participate in a science talk by discussing the idea of how insects are important to the rainforest. They record notes about their conversations as they talk. For homework, pupils add to their field journals.

Does technology affect our intelligence? Stefanie Olsen's article, "Intelligence in the Internet Age," and the thought provoking reading comprehension questions that follow, are sure to generate a lively discussion. 

Hold a discussion in writing about coping strategies to prepare your pupils for reading Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science by John Fleischman. After journaling, pupils come up in an organized fashion and write...

Fourth graders investigate visual imagery to aid reading comprehension. In this reading strategies lesson, 4th graders discover how visual imagery helps in comprehending a story. Students use a reader's notebook to record connections.

Readers identify main ideas and supporting details using informational texts. For this literacy lesson, they make predictions and read the text to find the main ideas. They use a table diagram to define the main idea and supporting...

An interactive timeline uses images, videos, primary source documents, and links to informational text to chronicle the history of the Holocaust from 1933-1945.

Check in on the development of your fifth graders' reading and writing skills with this Common Core-designed assessment. Given a series of six reading passages ranging from narrative stories to informational texts, young...

Help young mathematicians make cents out of the US currency system with this two-part math lesson. Children first learn the names and values for each type of coin, before learning to count and compare the values of coins using the...

Readers' theater is a fun way to get kids reading with expression and improve their fluency! There is a full script here for The Three Bears with five characters to assign.

What do you see? Young reader tap into the visualization process as they listen to or read a fiction story and fill out a graphic organizer. Model this first with a think-aloud, showing scholars how you visualize a familiar story. For...

Contrary to popular belief, the monster's name in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is not Frankenstein. A teacher's guide for the novel helps readers make sense of key details in the text, define vocabulary words, and discuss prominent...

Historical fiction novels give readers a chance to step into someone else's shoes. An educator's guide from Penguin Common Core Lesson Plans provides resources to accompany three historical fiction novels written by Ruta Sepetys: Between...

Scholars take to computers or devices to boost reading skills using educational software or websites.