Close reading is key to the analysis and interpretation of literature. A close reading of the title and the epigraph of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” offers readers an opportunity to examine how even single words or names can...

Encourage learners to ask questions about what they read with a activity about comprehension and inference questions. The resource provides directions and examples that guide kids through crafting their own questions.

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...

Making inferences and drawing conclusions is a key component to successful active reading. Encourage your class to use context clues and prior knowledge to infer different elements of a story, including the setting, plot, and character...

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...

In the tenth instructional activity of this unit, young scholars learn to categorize information as they continue researching their colonial trade. During guided practice, the teacher models how to read informational text slowly while...

A visual literary lesson provides learners with OPTIC (Observations, Predictions, Themes, Inferences, Conclusions), a reading strategy to help them understand and interpret visual and written texts. Scholars practice the strategy with a...

How can you tell if someone is happy? The lesson works with elementary and middle school scholars to activate their schema and pay attention to details to make inferences in their daily lives, poetry, and other literature. Cleverly...

Early settlers in the American Midwest experienced constant struggle. This reading passage describes for young learners the hardships of homesteaders as they journeyed west and sought to start a new life. When finished, students identify...

Emerging statisticians develop the ability to make inferences from sample data while also working on proportional relationships in general. Here, young learners examine samples for bias, and then use random samples to make...

Three of Emily Dickinson's poems, "I like to see it," "Because I could not stop for Death," and "We grow accustomed to the Dark," provide instructors with an opportunity to model for class members how to use close reading strategies to...

Good literature can be much like an iceberg requiring readers to presume that the bulk of the meaning may be inferred to be found below the surface. Here's a lesson that asks scholars to conduct a close reading of passages from The...

The five lessons in this resource are designed to teach class members how to read between the lines, how to use personal experience/background knowledge/schema, along with the information in the text, to make assumptions about...

"X" is for exaggeration, and "F" is for fact. To encourage close reading and to improve literary analysis skills, class members annotate fables and tall tales, like Paul Bunyan, with symbols that identify key features of this genre.

It is difficult to articulate how growing up feels as accurately and beautifully as Sandra Cisneros does in her short story "Eleven." After seventh graders read the story and note the author's use of figurative language, they respond to...

A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a single word can go a long way as well. Practice making inferences about character traits with a letter written from the perspective of a soldier in the American Revolution.

If you need to bulk up your reading comprehension worksheet collection, take a look at a resource that includes graphic organizers and reading comprehension questions. The series of 50 worksheets addresses novels such as Julie of...

Aid your pupils in understanding the terms explicit and inferred while teaching them about colonial farmers. The third activity in the module builds off the previous activity and focuses heavily on inference. Learners analyze a...

Turn your classroom into a pig sty with a instructional activity based on the Appalachian folktale The Pig Who Went Home on Sunday. Similar to the story of The Three Little Pigs, the folktale tells a story of four pigs who leave...

Do you have what it takes to survive in the wilderness? A high-interest reading passage offers practical advice while incorporating vocabulary practice. Follow-up worksheets focus on skills such as defining words, making inferences, and...

Fulfilling a dream requires a lot of hard work. A study guide for the novel A Single Shard shares the dream of a young Korean orphan. As readers work through the guide, they answer comprehension questions about Tree-ear and the...

Take your classes back in time. Learners read real historical texts from both Darwin and Wallace as well as an announcement of their findings. Using guiding questions, they make inferences and draw conclusions from the information in the...

Readers practice gathering textual evidence to support their understanding of character point of view in A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park. Working with partners, they complete a Gathering Evidence graphic organizer and engage in...

Throughout history, the growth of big cities has resulted in the destruction of ecosystems. In the case of Chicago, IL, a grassland that was once home to bison, deer, wolves, and foxes quickly became a booming city of over three million...