Readers of Dandelion Wine work in groups to develop questions on four levels (right there, think and search, the author and you, and on my own) about Chapter 34 of Ray Bradbury's reflection on the joys of summer. Groups jigsaw and...

Prepare your class for a unit on Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles with an activity that works for pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading. Learners fill out a K-W-H-L chart to reflect on what they already know, what...

Life changes may cause stress. Here, scholars identify stressful situations in a peer's life and offer coping skills to make for a better day. A short story, "Stressed Out Sally," provides pupils with a look inside a bad day. After...

A colorful PowerPoint is a great way to introduce the topic of visual literacy. The eye-catching presentation begins with an overview of visual literacy and then provides some specific strategies to help enhance reading comprehension. As...

Go beyond the textbook to gain a better appreciation for the English language. A series of ESL lessons help expand the concepts found in Theme 2: Give It All You've Got. The second lesson in a three-part unit incorporates strategies such...

For decades, the sight of blue books has struck fear in the hearts of collegians. Those books usually signal an essay exam, the topic of one of the handouts in a larger series on specific writing assignments. Using the handout, writers...

Here you'll find a great sampling of practice standardized test questions organized into four sections: ELA, mathematics, social studies, and science. Help your learners become familiar with the types of multiple-choice questions...

Introduce middle schoolers to the different strategies used when reading prose versus poetry. Groups use a Venn diagram and a poetry analysis handout to compare the characteristics of an informational text and a  poem on the same...

Keep an eye on the growth of your sixth graders' reading and writing skills with the help of this practice Common Core assessment. Working their way through the six included fiction and nonfiction reading passages, learners answer a...

Support all young learners on their journey to literacy with this five-lesson reading intervention unit. Following a clearly outlined format, each lesson first engages children in practicing their phonemic awareness and phonics...

Start with the question in mind with a discussion activity on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. With four focus questions, note-taking prompts, and discussion points, readers practice answering thematic questions based on textual evidence.

Provide young readers with the extra support they need using this series of 10 literacy lessons. Following a repeated sequence of learning activities, these lessons engage children in expanding their vocabulary...

Show young readers how to put some personality and voice into their storytelling with an in-depth assignment. Kids practice saying the same thing, such as counting from one to ten, in different tones and perspectives, and then work on...

Fresh off the press, these math newsletters will challenge the problem solving skills of your young mathematicians. With an incredibly wide variety of questions covering the topics of arithmetic and geometry, these unique...

Turning 11 comes with a range of emotions. Explore those emotions by reading the short story "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros. Readers analyze the main character's reactions to the events of her day. Then, they write an essay describing what...

Teach learners to reflect on their reading with a lesson about double-entry journals. As they read Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, class members note interesting passages from the text on the left side of their...

Learning to craft quality questions is a skill that can be taught. Class members use the Question Formulation Technique to learn how to create and refine both closed-ended and open-ended questions. They then view West of the West's...

Accompany a reading of First Come the Zebra written and illustrated by Lynne Barasch with a teacher's guide equipped with before reading, vocabulary, and after reading activities. Additional social studies,...

Making inferences is a skill that goes beyond the comprehension of written text. In this simple exercise, young learners are provided with a photograph and asked to answer a series of inference questions using only on the...

Listen, or read, to a first-hand account of how 15-year old Adama survived being bullied. Scholars gain insight into Adama's experience while reinforcing reading comprehension and vocabulary skills using context clues.   

A divorce can seem like everything's changing, but some things do stay the same. Read a passage about Penny and her parents, comparing and contrasting the ways her parents' houses are the same and are different.

Scholars read additional pages in Unbroken to discover more about Louie's character. Readers use turn-and-talk strategies to discuss character traits that describe Louie. They then answer text-dependent questions and cite evidence to...

Is Sherlock Holmes an inductivist or a deductivist? Users of this interactive to distinguish between inductive and deductive reasoning. They consider in various situations whether it is better to list evidence and then introduce a claim...

What's the best way to evaluate a source's accuracy and credibility? Pupils discuss the question with a partner and then share their ideas with the class. They also conduct Internet research, looking for an article that answers a chosen...