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Organizer
Teacher Printables

Making Connections

For Teachers 3rd - 10th
Encourage your readers to make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections with a graphic organizer that also asks them to detail how they made these connections. Reproduce the template for each learner or project the...
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Lesson Plan
Hawaiʻi State Department of Education

Text Connections

For Teachers 5th
There are so many different ways to help learners make text-to-self connections. Here, fifth graders will create tableaus that show an event from a chapter in the class reader. They'll discuss why they chose that event to dramatize and...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Blue Ribbon Readers: Making Connections

For Teachers K - 5th Standards
Model for young readers how to make the shift from passive to active reading by making text-to-self and text-to-text connections. After a series of activities that provide guided practice, the focus shifts to making text-to-words...
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Lesson Planet Article
Curated OER

Create College-Ready Readers with Text-Dependent Questions

For Teachers 8th - 12th
Build content literacy and cater to the Common Core State Standards by creating text-dependent questions to accompany reading passages.
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Lesson Plan
Penguin Books

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Young Readers Edition

For Teachers 6th - 8th Standards
As the saying goes, you are what you eat. A useful set of lesson plans encourage young readers to take a second look at their eating habits. Pre- and post-reading questions bring in reflective writing and discussion while extension...
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Lesson Planet Article
Curated OER

Blooming the Gospel According to Holden

For Teachers 7th - 9th
Use Bloom's Taxonomy to establish protocols in your classroom so that all readers make personal connections to the literature they are studying.
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Text-to-Text Connections: Pygmalion

For Teachers 7th Standards
Scholars refer to a British Dialect/Slang anchor chart as they answer text-dependent questions over section eight of Pygmalion. While learners work on the questions, the teacher conducts check-ins on the progress of their independent...
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Worksheet
2
2
K12 Reader

Making Connections to Text

For Students 2nd - 3rd Standards
This short reading comprehension worksheet encourages readers to make self-to text, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections as a way of remembering what they have read.
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Activity
Washington Township Public Schools

Using Paired Text

For Teachers 4th Standards
Paired reading passages frequently appear on standardized exams, but finding text sets to use in the classroom is sometimes a challenge. A lesson plan on using paired texts includes a selection of passages and a graphic organizer for...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Introduce Vocabulary: Franklin Goes to the Hospital (Bourgeois)

For Teachers K - 3rd
Franklin the turtle is on another adventure in Paulette Bourgeois' book Franklin Goes to the Hospital, and there are plenty of new words for your young readers to explore as they hear this story. Although you can include more, you'll...
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Text-Dependent Questions and Choosing Details to Support a Claim: Digging Deeper into Paragraphs 6–8 of Steve Jobs’ Commencement Address (and connecting to Chapter 7)

For Teachers 6th Standards
Readers learn how to choose specific details drawn from a primary source (Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford University commencement address) to support an analysis of informative text.
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Launching Readers Theater Groups: Identifying Passages from Esperanza Rising for Readers Theater that Connect to the UDHR

For Teachers 5th Standards
Teach young readers how to compare two texts and select passages that exemplify a specific theme with Lesson 6 from Unit 3. Begin by modeling how an expert reader selects examples from a text, performing a think aloud on how Article 2 of...
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Getting the Gist and Determining Word Meaning: Paragraphs 12–14 of Steve Jobs’ Commencement Address (and connecting to Chapter 8)

For Teachers 6th Standards
Groups use a Venn diagram to compare the theme of love and loss in Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address to Stanford University students and Christopher Paul Curtis' Bud, Not Buddy.
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Using Drama to Examine Communities: Walking in Others' Shoes

For Teachers 6th - 12th
Encourage your readers to make connections between texts with this resource. After compiling notes for each text read (you choose the texts), groups craft skits in which major characters from each text meet. There is a rubric for the...
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Assessment
Fluence Learning

Writing About Informational Text: Beyond the Beyond—Galaxies

For Students 8th Standards
Everyone has a different point of view, even when it comes to the enormity of the universe. Two separate text passages explain the scope of a galaxy, prompting young readers to write an essay about each author's argument and how the...
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Activity
Florida Center for Reading Research

Fluency: Connected Text, Readers' Theater

For Teachers K - 1st Standards
Readers' theater is a fun way to get kids reading with expression and improve their fluency! There is a full script here for The Three Bears with five characters to assign.
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Writing
Curated OER

Student Opinion: How Impulsive Are You?

For Students 9th - 12th
Sure to spark lively discussion in any Language Arts classroom, this article from The York Times asks the question, 'How much self-control do you have?'. Pupils begin by reading a short passage about a study on delayed gratification and...
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Mid-Unit Assessment: Text-Dependent Short-Answer Quiz—The Effects of Natural Disasters

For Teachers 5th Standards
Readers complete a mid-unit assessment by reading the text How Do Hurricanes Form? They answer text-dependent questions about hurricanes with short answer and sequencing. Learners then participate in a read aloud and text chunking...
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Readers Theater and the UDHR

For Teachers 5th Standards
Let's make connections! Using the resource, class members make connections between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and their readers theater scripts. To finish, they complete a worksheet to evaluate the role of narration in...
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Lesson Plan
Curated OER

Introduce Reading Connected Text

For Teachers K - 1st Standards
Get your scholars ready to read their first story...with a little assistance, of course. Projecting the short story (included) for all readers to see, point to each word so they can sound it out together. The strategy here is not to have...
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Getting the Gist: Steve Jobs Commencement Address (Focus on Paragraphs 6-8, and connecting to Chapter 6)

For Teachers 6th Standards
As part of a unit study of Bud, Not Buddy, readers compare Buddy's list of rules to live by with those that Steve Jobs enumerates in his commencement address to Stanford's 2005 graduating class.
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Lesson Plan
Harper Collins

Parrot in the Oven: Response Journal

For Teachers 6th - 12th
After completing Chapter 5 of Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, readers make text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections to Victor Martinez's novel by crafting journal entries addressing comments and questions to characters in...
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Connecting the Theme of the Expert Group Myth to a Theme in The Lightning Thief and to Life Lessons

For Teachers 6th Standards
Expert groups discuss the theme of their myths and the life lessons people learn from it. They then regroup their triads so that there is a pupil from each expert myth group and share details about their myths. The class also talks about...
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Lesson Plan
EngageNY

Connecting Informational Text with Litearature: Building Background Knowledge About Mexican Immigration, California, and the Great Depression

For Teachers 5th Standards
Help your class transition as the setting in the novel Esperanza Rising, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, moves from Mexico to California. Beginning with prior knowledge, and moving into jigsaw research groups, class members add to and create posters...