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Text Clues and Prior Knowledge
Explore making predictions as a reading strategy. As a class, read "Blue Light, Green Light," stopping to make a prediction. After recording a prediction on the graphic organizer, discuss the thoughts behind your idea. Then, continue...
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Using Compare and Contrast Key Words
Compare and contrast while challenging your class with this higher-level thinking and reading comprehension lesson. After observing the teacher model comparing and contrasting bats and birds, learners read passages about two towns. They...
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Predicting Actions
Analyze and predict a character's actions in a text by reading the book Julius, Baby of the World and discussing the character's personality. Individuals use a character action chart to record their actions throughout the story, and then...
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Which Story Matches the Given Theme?
Model for young learners how to determine the theme of a story. Read aloud Aesop’s The Fox and the Stork. Chart the plot and the main idea of the fable, showing class members how these elements support the theme. Fable titles for guided...
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Story Elements that Support the Theme
Three great graphic organizers guide readers to see how the elements of plot and main idea can be charted to reveal the theme of a story. Model the process on the provided Direct Teaching Teacher Graphic Organizer using Aesop’s The...
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Lesson 3: Distinguishing the Author's Purpose
It is true that the more you practice something, the better you'll get at doing it. Lesson three in a three part series on author's purpose has kids venture out to determine the author's purpose in three different passages. They'll read...
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Antagonist
Young learners explore the antagonist. They retell Hansel and Gretel and identify the witch and the stepmother as antagonists. They then brainstorm common character traits of an antagonist, and then write a paragraph describing an...
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Organizing Research
Before sending your third graders to the library, help them build a solid foundation for their research with this plan. Following the "I do, we do, you do" method, the teacher starts by modeling how to create a research question and...
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How Characters Affect the Plot
How do a character’s feelings and actions influence the plot of a story? The interaction between character and plot is explored in this lesson that uses When Charlie McButton Lost Power to launch the discussion. Charlie’s love of...
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Steps are in Sequence
Mary Hill's Let's Make Pizza provides elementary schoolers with a chance to practice sequencing. Young bakers arrange the pictures and text sentence strips in order before creating their own culinary masterpieces.
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Sequence Clue Words
Leaners read the book Let's Make Tacos and draw a line from the sequence clue words to the step-by-step actions in the book. In order to complete this exercise, they use words such as first, next, last, after, and more. Excellent ideas...
Perkins School for the Blind
Please Call Me Names!
Teaching students who are blind means teaching them skills a sighted person may take for granted. To practice calling people and objects by name, learners engage in a cueing activity. The child calls for an adult by name, and then uses a...
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Prefixes
Learners explore prefixes, and how they help us decipher unknown words. Decode and define the meaning of boldface words with prefixes used in context on a classroom chart. Writers complete a worksheet practicing the same skill.
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Sorting Characters in More Than One Way
Introduce your class to characterization. Familiar story characters are sorted into "good" and "bad" categories based on the characters' personalites and actions in the story. The class discusses and describes characters they have read...
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Analyzing Sequence with Exception Questions
Can you build comprehension by reading about sports? Third graders read and analyze the story, Game Day. They work through the book to better understand the sequence of events, they practice eliminating incorrect answers to questions...
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Lesson 3: Proving Facts and Forming Opinions
Time for Kids: Butterflies is used to model the process of determining if a text is based on fact or opinion. Children are taught how to skim for key words, and use headings or chapter names to locate proof of whether or not what they...
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Using Plot Elements to Retell a Story
The stories in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street form the basis for a lesson plan on plot elements. The class examines introduction, sequence, problem, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution and identifies these...
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To Persuade
Young scholars identify and review persuasive literature looking at the characteristics, traits, and uses for this type of literature. In this persuasive literature lesson, students read and discuss articles that are trying to persuade...
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Genre Lesson: What is a Mystery?
Students identify the characteristics of the genre of mystery. In this genre instructional activity, students discover the elements of a mystery story and begin recording the elements on a class chart of the book entitled Two-Minute...
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Predicting a Mystery's Solution
Awarded the 1998 Edgar Award for Best Children's Mystery, Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief offers readers a chance to hone their predictive and deductive skills along with Sammy Keyes, who the Midwest Children's Book Review calls "the...
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Implicit Effects
Third graders describe cause and effect. In this implicit effects lesson students name the implicit effects in the story Two Ways to Count to Ten: A Liberian Folk Tale by Ruby Dee. Students analyze the story to find details to support...
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Answering a Research Question
Students explore beginning research skills. For this nonfiction comprehension and research lesson, students generate possible research questions to answer when given the book title of Animals of the Sea and Shore by Ann O. Squire....
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Lesson 1: Using Compare and Contrast Key Words
Third graders compare and contrast two things. In this comparing lesson, 3rd graders see vocabulary words used when comparing or contrasting two items. They read the story Alligators and Crocodiles by Trudi Strain Trueit and write a...
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Compare and Contrast Settings
Third graders compare different lifestyles. In this settings lesson plan, 3rd graders read Colonial Life, determine similarities and differences between today and life in Colonial times and write a passage about these similarities and...