Teach learners how to interact with both fiction and non-fiction text with a packet of activities and worksheets. After looking over text structure and the difference in text features between different types of writing,...

Work on identifying text structure with this thorough activity. After studying a diagram depicting six different text structures (compare/contrast, spatial, chronological, problem and solution, cause and effect, and order of...

Fifth graders analyze patterns and begin looking at function tables. This is a pertinent preparation for graphing patterns. In fact, consider giving your class a piece of graph paper and then teach them how!

Students are introduced to the structure of folk tales. After working through an example, they identify as many folk tales as possible that follow the same pattern. In groups, they compare a folk tale and a fairy tale to identify the...

Explore plot structure by analyzing text samples with writers. They define terms such as problem and solution, cause and effect, and story arc. They also identify the sequences used in modern stories by reading samples and determining...

Visit the Magic Treehouse and take your class on a trip through time with a reading of the children's book Mummies in the Morning. Using the story to spark an investigation into Egyptian culture, this literature unit engages...

Over four weeks, third graders participate in lessons that boost spelling, grammar, reading, and writing skills. Scholars explore spelling patterns, suffixes, singular and plural possessive nouns, quotations, and conjunctions....

Individuals complete a pre-assessment to gauge their ability to determine the main idea and supporting details in nonfiction text. They examine a new piece of nonfiction reading by looking at the table of contents, headings, and index...

In an ideal world, sentences in a college-level essay should feature a variety of sentence types. In reality, most papers stick to simple and compound sentences, two of the types a handout on sentence patterns discusses. Part of a larger...

Robert Hayden's poem "Those Winter Sundays" serves as the anchor text in a five-part instructional activity that takes the mystery out of poetry analysis by modeling explicit strategies for pupils to employ to conduct a close reading of...

As part of their study of Things Fall Apart, class members conduct a close reading of a section of Chinua Achebe's essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Jigsaw groups then compare the voice in the essay...

In this patterns in tables practice worksheet, students sharpen their problem solving skills as they solve 6 story problems that require them to write functions.

In this multiplication worksheet, students solve 6 word problems where they use skip counting or create a t-chart to find a pattern in order to arrive at an answer.

Don't shun this worksheet based around -un words! Class members read a quick poem full of -un words and then respond to three comprehension questions about the text.

To launch a unit study of the concept of diversity in World Literature, class members compare Chinua Achebe's essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" and Richard Rodriguez's essay, "The Chinese in All of...

Bully, bullied, or bystander? Paul Langan's The Bully is the anchor text in a unit that examines bullying and violence. After a close reading of the text, readers imagine themselves as the characters and consider how they would react in...

Students demonstrate their understanding of patterns and create patterns to share with others. Each student selects a different set of materials to create a pattern. Digital photographs are taken of each student and his or her pattern.

Students explore the patterns of text structure to anticipate the kind of information that a reading might present. The instructional activity examines some of the components of reading writing and using nonfiction.

Over three weeks, third graders participate in lessons designed to boost spelling and grammar skills—adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns—and prefixes. Readings are themed to share stories about Colonial America.

Sometimes words aren't the best way to get information across to the reader. The eighth handout in the 24-part Writing the Paper series describes different type of figures and charts to display complex information in a paper....

Third graders continue to practice the close reading skills of capturing the gist and reading again for important details in the sixth lesson in a larger unit. This is a great beginning-of-the-year unit for establishing visible thinking...

Readers identify main ideas and supporting details using informational texts. In this literacy lesson plan, they make predictions and read the text to find the main ideas. They use a table diagram to define the main idea and supporting...

Gather some information, print it onto sentence strips, and then have your class physically shuffle the cards to better understand the importance of organizational patterns in writing. Middle school learners examine information for a...

Evolution happens over generations, so how do we observe it? Scholars learn to look for patterns and create cladograms. Then they apply those lessons to the evolution of technology over many generations.