Is your city's history a mystery to your class? Ever wonder if your county contains a bounty of folklore? Young computer scientists incorporate technology with time-honored tales during a project with both individual and group...

Learning how to summarize can be a challenge. Guide your writers through the process of summarizing a story using the children's tale; I Want My Hat Back for practice. Class members then use this "Somebody, Wanted, But,...

Mark Twain's frame story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" provides an opportunity for a study of this story-within-a-story pattern. Using an illustrated template, class members record a plot summary of the frame story...

Bring this lesson on hubris to your short story unit. After reading Jack London's "To Build a Fire," young readers discuss the role of hubris in the protagonist's death. The lesson has connections to other short stories, such as "The...

Enhance and extend instruction of "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin with one or all of these ideas. You might want to cover characterization and summary, or improve understanding of context clues and irony. You can cover any...

Students explore language arts by completing a graphic organizer in class. In this story structure instructional activity, students read the classic tale "The Three Little Pigs" and discuss the main characters, conflict and setting....

What happens next? Work on story sequence with a lesson that prompts kids to put a story back in order. Additionally, they discuss what would happen if one event was missing from the sequence.

Learners read a story with 220 basic sight words. They discuss why the words are important to identify and utilize them in their own writing assignments.

Compare two versions of "The Three Little Pigs" (traditional and Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, told from the wolf's point of view). As your 4th graders recount the familiar version of the story, emphasize the...

Students read a short selection of a story individually or as a class. On their own, they create a story pyramid for the selection and write a one page summary. They use text from the story for their supporting details. To end the...

After watching and discussing a video on the Voyage of Cabrillo, individuals craft their own origin story and design and build an artifact they feel best represents their history.

Introduce your class to Inuit prints and use these artworks as inspiration for a printmaking activity. Pupils make stories to go along with the images and then come up with their own heroic moments to illustrate. They take moments from...

Explore the Ukraine through a reading of The Mitten. Readers will determine the sequence of events, cause and effect, make predictions, and find the main idea of the story. They also use math skills to make charts and graphs. Finally,...

This resource contains summaries of the stories featured, but limited procedural detail. Readers compare Chopin's stories' use of situational irony and foreshadowing. High interest content (questionable paternity, missing persons) for...

This is an example of what a story map book report can look like using mind wing teaching concepts. Consider this idea as a way to provide special needs or those with learning disabilities a way to communicate what they know or learned...

Strong comprehension questions and a list of initiating events that drive the plot make this resource worth a try in your classroom. Intended for use with tools specific to the mindwing concepts reading strategy system, the outline...

There's nothing like the prospect of writing a scary story to get your middle schoolers' writing juices flowing! In the instructional activity presented here, pupils listen to scary short stories read to them by the teacher. Then, a...

Why didn't Rapunzel's hair stop growing?  Why did it take the fairy godmother so long to intervene in Cinderella's affairs? Young writers consider unanswered questions like these and compose news articles investigating the true...

Explore a trailblazing way to talk about innovation. Using the Scratch coding program, young computer scientists create innovations and write stories to accompany them. They include some of the add-ons they mastered throughout the unit.

Youngsters practice summarizing and retelling the story of The Three Little Pigsin their own words as well as the original version of the book. They color the pictures and cut out a similiar house on their own as well.

Writing a summary is much easier once you've laid out the sequence of events. Show readers how these two skills are intertwined using this graphic organizer. Review the meaning of sequencing first, presenting the chart and possibly...

Seventh graders write a few sentences explaining the most important events of their lives during the past year. As a class, they discuss why they chose the elements they did for their sentences. To end the lesson, they read a variety of...

Explore the concept of retelling a story with the Gingerbread Man. Read various gingerbread man stories with your class. They will create character puppets and retell the story to one another and in small groups. Additionally, they will...

Tell a story with images. Learners view several photojournalistic photos before agreeing on a message to convey with their own photo stories. In small groups, they take and select photos to include in their final project.