Scholars become architects in an engaging unit on building structures. The Reading Adventure Pack features Roberto: The Insect Architect by Nina Laden and Construction Zone with photographs by Richard Sobol and text by Cheryl Willis...

Want to boost your readers' comprehension skills and strategies? Look to these five pages, each with a short story and questions to answer covering main idea, facts, sequence of events, context clues, conclusions, and making...

Pupils use fluency checklists in this lesson to improve oral reading ability. The teacher models fluent and timed reading while reading the story "Fuzz and the Buzz." The students work with a partner to time each others oral reading...

First graders explore the genre of fables. In this fables lesson, 1st graders use various reading strategies to raise comprehension skills. Students make prediction and complete a prediction journal. Students understand that fables have...

What better way to examine a text than to ask your own questions? Use Bloom's taxonomy to guide kids through Carl Hiaasen's Hoot by asking questions based on knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

An advocate of the cloze procedure to determine what learners already know about a topic?  Class members listen to an excerpt from The Call of the Wild and then fill in the blanks on their cloze copy of the passage.  Directions...

Learners can chart what they know, what they would like to know, how they plan to learn, and what they have learned from Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Using questions about women's rights, kids study the themes of the novel...

Guide readers to think about what they are reading with a comprehension activity. Using John Steinbeck's The Pearl, learners predict what is coming, verify and judge their predictions, and analyze what they are reading more closely.

Third graders answer text-dependent questions of the story Nasreen's Secret School both independently and then collaboratively through using the carousel of questions strategy. This plan is the seventh instructional activity in a...

Build a culture of attendance with the help of this 7-page toolkit loaded with suggestions for specific things you and parents can do to improve attendance, and in turn, raise the achievement of learners. Included are suggestions for...

Explicitly explained and delightfully detailed are two ways to describe this tenth lesson plan in a larger unit designed for the first few weeks of third grade. Learners continue to use and develop previously learned close reading...

In the second lesson plan in a series that revolves around the story, Thank You, Mr. Falker, learners practice the skill of answering direct questions from the text while using complete sentences. After a teacher-led review of how to...

As your class progresses through Chapter four of Ethan Frome, provide them with these thought-provoking questions built using Bloom's Taxonomy. 

What should readers do to prepare for reading an informational text? What should they do during their reading? What should they do after completing such a text? Introduce your pupils to reading strategies and techniques to gain meaning...

Inntroduce primary learners to essential critical reading strategies with an activity based on James Reeves' poem, "The Wind."  Learners listen as the poem is read, first as a riddle, and then re-read with the title visible. The...

To prepare for a reading of Christopher E. Crowe's Mississippi Trial, 1955, class members create a KWHL chart and begin by generating questions they have about the civil rights movement, slavery, and the death of Emmett...

Prior to reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, class members use the provided worksheet to list what they know about the Holocaust, what they want to know, and how they will find the information they seek. After...

Pupils build confidence working with percents as they work several types of percent problems to increase their fluency. The resource contains two sets of problems specifically designed to build efficiency in finding solutions of basic...

How do you grow a goal from a dream to reality? You make a plan! After reading chapters two and three of Where the Red Fern Grows, learners map how Billy earns his dogs by completing an organizer in pairs and then discussing answers in...

Collaborate with your class after reading William Shakespeare's The Tempest with a group labeling activity. As you note key concepts or words from the play on the board, class members suggest associations and connections...

Challenge readers to read closer in an activity based on the Socratic questioning strategy. As kids read Antoine de Saint Éxupery's The Little Prince, they use sentence starters to ask deeper questions about the text, and...

As part of a reading of Elie Wiesel's Night class members engage in a directed reading/thinking activity that includes crafting predictions, verifying these predictions, and interpreting portions of the text.

What is your strategy? Scholars read "The Border" and work with a partner to practice reading strategies to use while independent reading. They identify difficult parts where they practiced rereading by marking them with sticky notes,...