Inquiring Minds Want To Know

Investigate the life of Mahatma Gandhi by researching non-violent lifestyles. Learners define the word ahimsa and discuss the personal characteristics that made Gandhi a peaceful warrior. They also create a poster about the story "The...

The Story of a Wise Woman tells the tale of South Carolina's, Eliza Lucas Pinckney and how she persevered to plant and harvest indigo. With this short story and questions learning exercise, your early readers test their...

For those class members who have mastered the basic concepts and need extra challenges, here's a packet of activities sure to engage them in stories about American immigration and exploration. Kids may design a dramatic...

Keep track of your learners' mastered sight words with 11 sets of words. Four columns list the words, as well as three columns for you to mark the date of mastery. 

Readers reflect on enjoyable stories they know, brainstorm criteria that make a story "good," analyze a New York Times article about innovative children's performances, re-envision classics on their own, and peer edit drafts. Use this as...

Review story elements with your class. They will use examples from a story to develop critical-thinking questions. Then they use a graphic organizer to describe the setting, character, and plot of the story, focusing on how they...

An 18-minute audiobook expresses the importance of speaking the truth with an engaging reading of "The Emperor's New Clothes" by Hans Christian Andersen.

If your students made a list of their favorite things, would writing poetry be on it? After this poetry writing lesson, it might! Young writers make a list of what they like—or what they don't like—before crafting the list into...

Encourage scholars to retell their favorite short story or folktale, adding personal details to make it their own. After reading their book of choice several times, story tellers retell a tale verbally to their classmates. 

Learners retell a story using the correct sequence of events for a story they have listened to five times. They identify the characters and the setting for the story, and sequence the events using a dissembled copy of the book.