Invite your text detectives to bring their magnifying glasses to school to examine the clues in a text and make predictions. They write down three clues and a prediction on the graphic organizer.

Prepare your class for argumentative writing with a close inspection of the controversy surrounding Theodore Taylor's novel, The Cay. All necessary articles and materials are linked at the beginning of the resource. Kids use the provided...

Examine one cause and its effect in-depth. To complete this graphic organizer, learners write down a topic, the cause, the effect, and a brief analysis of the cause and effect relationship. 

The words of "Common Sense" and Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death!" speech ring throughout history. Scholars explore the nuances of each patriot's argument using excerpts from the famous pamphlet and speech and a recorded...

Get your writers ready to compose a constructed response essay in response to either an informational or fictional text. Pupils note down the big idea they wish to address as well as up to nine examples from the text that they wish to...

Teach your young readers how to summarize a text using a strategy called Somebody Wanted But So. Kids identify the character (Somebody), the motivation (Wanted), the conflict (But), and the resolution (So). The resource comes with...

Prevent your students from making a disaster out of their writing journals while attempting to draw their own graphic organizer. Instead, use this perfectly proportioned template of a Venn diagram.

Have your class organize information about strikes in a handy chart. Pupils take notes on the Homestead Strike, the Lawrence Strike, and the Pullman Strike. Along the left side of the chart are six questions for learners to answer about...

Take a look at foreshadowing in any text by recording instances of foreshadowing in a straightforward graphic organizer. Learners note down the event, the clue, and the page number for five foreshadowed events. There is also space for...

Discover the benefits of professional associations. Learners explore professional organizations affiliated with a career pathway, completing a KWHL chart and viewing a PowerPoint along the way. To finish, they create an online poster for...

Should Charlie undergo an operation to increase his intelligence? A mini-lesson plan for a unit on Daniel Keyes novel Flowers for Algernon uses a RAFT activity, which prompts students to write a letter to Charlie's doctors explaining why...

The fabulous four. Scholars learn the four key components for creating an excellent journal entry. They then work to create a journal entry rubric and participate in a mini lesson about organizing and outlining journal entries. 

Activate scholars' knowledge of prefixes and suffixes with a matching game that challenges learners to identify meanings, build words, and write and illustrate sentences. 

This activity may have writers evaluate short compositions, but their subjects are quite tall: great Americans. Pupils read one another's compositions and closely examine how specific phrases and diction contribute to shaping American...

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...

Invite your pupils to tell and show what happened in a story that they read by filling out this organizer. Using images and words, kids can fill out the six panels provided here to demonstrate understanding of the sequence of events and...

Connect Martin Luther King Jr's famous speech, "I Have a Dream," to The Cay by Theodore Taylor. Taylor refers to the speech in his dedication, which creates a natural segue into talking about the speech and how it relates to the novel....

Similar to a textbook, this resource includes multiple texts, plenty of explanation, lots of practice, and several graphic organizers. Use all of the materials, or pick and choose from such texts as "The Circuit," "Shoes for Hector,"...

Keep track of constitutional principles with a graphic organizer. Pupils define, describe the origins of, and note down the location of the following terms: checks and balances, federalism, individual rights, limited government, popular...

Here you'll find a simple graphic organizer that learners can use to categorize the political, economic, and social motivations behind the establishment of the thirteen colonies.

Guide your class through a reading of the popular children's book, Frindle, with this comprehensive literature unit. Starting with a brief introduction to the guided reading process, the class goes on to read the story two chapters...

Finding the central idea in a text is equally important in fiction and nonfiction. Work on analyzing a piece of writing for the central idea with Karen Russell's "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," complete with supporting...

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, a play about star-crossed lovers, resonates deeply with teenagers. The study packet contains study questions for each act of the play. Learners use a graphic organizer to analyze whether characters...

What does it mean to turn inside out? Using the resource, scholars begin planning their end-of-unit assessment essays. They complete two graphic organizers to form claims about how refugees turn "inside out" and "back again."