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 PowerPoint includes text describing the key elements of a community, as well as the unique features of a suburb, a city, and a town.  Illustrations and clip art are included depicting each type of community. Instructions for...

The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory unit is a golden ticket for teachers looking for nicely written plans. Elementary and middle schoolers draw their impressions of characters, design and market their own candy creations, and use...

Feeling high is not the only side effect of abusing prescription opioids. Middle and high schoolers learn more about specific painkillers, including Fentanyl, Oxycodone, and Clonazepam, as well as their common brand names and extensive...

Look back at the third chapter of The Cay with your class. Pupils will conduct a close reading, taking a second look at a chunk of text and responding to a series of text-dependent questions. Wrap up with an analytical writing prompt...

Assess scholars' reading and writing capabilities with an exam that challenges learners to respond to an informative text. Through note-taking and peer discussion, pupils analyze a passage from the story, Follow the Water from Brook to...

Focus on plot and the impact-specific events in The Cay. Class members use their double-entry journals, created in a previous lesson in this series, to record their thinking about the guiding question as they read chapters 15 through 17....

Track the poetic elements in any text with a guided reading worksheet. Kids note examples of consonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, repetition, rhyme, and rhythm when reading a poem or story, and provide a short explanation as...

Reading and comprehending a poem is a lot different than doing the same for a piece of fiction or an informational text. As part of a sample English language arts examination, readers put their skills to the test by reading passages in...

The second lesson of a pair about Paul Laurence Dunbar, this plan focuses in particular on his poem, "We Wear the Masks." After a short historical introduction, class members conduct a series or readings, marking up the text and...

Grab any two topics, some index cards, and a couple of kids, and you're ready to compare and contrast! The resource provides instructions for this method and three graphic organizers in addition to or in place of the index cards.

Successful arguing is a learned skill. Pupils read four passages and craft a text-based argument about the return of extinct animals. The resources provides writers with specific guidelines on how to create a well-rounded essay and how...

Take a look at a very simple lesson on text size, text colors, and font choices. There is a step-by-step guide directing the young learners on what to do to change these things when working on a computer. Take it even further by adding a...

Pogrom, schlepped, meshuga. Kapo, reich, Wehrmacht. As part of a unit study of Maus I and II, readers use a list-group-label (LGL) strategy for vocabulary drawn from Art Spiegelman's famous graphic novels. The focus of the activity is...

Lesson 10 in a series of human rights lessons focuses on the skills of finding evidence and summarizing. Your young readers work to compare the two texts they have read in this unit: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...

Middle schoolers develop strategies for what to do when they come upon words in a text that they don't know. After a class discussion, pupils are given a selection of text that contains some very difficult words. They are instructed to...

Looking to introduce some text-based questions into your ELA lessons? Practice the kinds of skills the Common Core demands with the seven text-based questions and the essay prompt provided here. Designed to be a three-day lesson, day one...

Make your learners aware of the advantages and disadvantages of using different media in presentations. This straightforward resource evaluates media formations such as print, digital text, and videos. Although the subject of ballet is...

Like Oskar, the curious boy in Jonathan Safran Foer’s story, class members journey through other “stories that the mouth can’t tell” to find another sentence that uses a word found in novel. Individuals create their own vocabulary list,...

Compare and contrast World War II to the modern Iraq war with this instructional activity. After watching a film, learners use supporting evidence to support their point of view of the conflicts. Using the internet, they create a...

Do your young readers know that poems can be performed as a team? They listen to a few examples from Paul Fleischman's book Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, paying attention to how the how readers work together....

Students are able to evaluate their peers' essays to determine clarity, completeness, and persuasiveness. They are able to revise their own essays for greater clarity and fluency, adding explanation where needed and cutting extraneous...

In order to make evidence-based claims, one must be able to draw explicit information from text. From here, learners take that information, analyze the text to develop a deeper understanding, and connect with the information in order to...

Inspire young readers with this printable biography of Helen Keller. Including a timeline, glossary, and realistic illustrations with supporting captions, this is a great resource for not only teaching children about this amazing...