The death of a parent can turn a child's world upside down. A curriculum guide for The Secret Hum of a Daisy explores defining moments in the main character's life, including the loss of her mother. Chapter-by-chapter discussion...

Teach the importance of context and perspective with a unit focused on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first lesson considers the role of female characters and readers, including the gender expectations of the time. The...

Support your instruction of The Cay by Theodore Taylor with this extensive unit of materials. Provided here are prereading activities, worksheets and discussion questions for the entire book, and reading quizzes that you can use to check...

Yo-ho-ho, Treasure Island can be lots of fun with the aid of a resource that guides readers' exploration of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of buccaneers and buried gold. It's the glory of the read that will turn your...

Strap on those backpacks, it's time to travel through history with this literature unit based on the first four books of The Magic Tree House series. While reading through these fun stories, children create story maps, record...

Fifty eye-catching pages contain six lessons about Roald Dahl's novel, Matilda. Each lesson has a theme and covers a different subject—literacy, social-emotional learning, science, and geography. Scholars analyze characters, examine...

Good discussion questions, quizzes, and tests teach as well as assess. Readers of The Great Gatsby will learn much from the materials in a 36-page packet designed to help students prepare for the AP Literature exam. Included in the...

Paul Fisher, the main character in Tangerine, comes to see that it's the choices in life that lead to the consequences that make all the difference. A unit study of Bloor's young adult novel leads readers down this same path. 

Each page of a comprehension packet that accompanies James and The Giant Peach requires learners to think, comprehend, focus on characters, make text-to-self and text-to-world connections, and build vocabulary through context....

What is the difference between myths, legends, and folktales? From greek mythology and creation myths to heroes and heroines, here is a nice series of lessons for providing your kids with solid foundational knowledge about myths.

Students search into a variety of story elements in the eight lessons of this unit. The title, author, illustrator, setting, main character, problem, solution, events and the story are the components of the lessons.

The second module in a series for high school seniors focuses on tracking the central idea of a text across genres and from multiple author and character perspectives. Twelfth graders read a speech by Benazir Bhutto entitled "Ideas Live...

Students interact with the main concepts of a narrative text in the six lessons of this unit. The setting, prediction, retelling, sequencing, and the identification of the beggining, middle and end of a story are investigated.

Should primary graders have their own computers? Should animals be kept in captivity? Young writers learn how to develop and support a claim in this short unit on persuasive writing.

Would it have been you? Scholars investigate the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II. They view, interpret, and analyze the video The Holocaust to gain insight into who exactly was impacted by the events Europe. They then...

Students complete writing activities for fiction. In this fiction writing lesson, students complete four sets of activities in a writer's workshop format to practice reading and writing in a fiction style. Students develop plot outlines,...

Students read Tom Thumb story versions from around the world. They locate the country on a map. They compare and contrast the stories and analyze common elements found in fairytales. They create a finger puppet and write about being...

Students study fables in a broad context. In this literary lesson on fables, students define terms unique to them. Students use a variety of technological resources to gather and classify information into three categories. Students also...

Students explore the concepts of fantasy writing through this nine lessons unit. The unit presents semantic mapping, discussions, comparisons of various works of fantasy, and the opportunity to create their own fantasies.

This learning module focuses on reading for key ideas and details including main characters, problems, and solutions. It provides a detailed example with an explanation and a practice paragraph with questions.

"I Like Plants" is a one page, realistic fiction, reading passage about a person who loves plants and became a botanist; now she teaches her college students about plants and ecology. It is followed by constructed-response questions...

Jacqueline Woodson describes her experiences growing up as an African American girl in South Carolina and New York in the 1960s. Selected (6) reading passages (grades 3-6) to pair with "Brown Girl Dreaming" by Jacqueline Woodson. [Free...

A classic novel, Animal Farm, has captured readers for decades. Read about the main characters, themes and study questions to learn more about the novel in this excellent site.