Explore writing techniques by analyzing newspapers and magazines with middle schoolers. They will collaborate in small groups to read local news stories and identify the main ideas and author's intent. They also utilize an information...

Shrink up a section by asking pupils to write down the main idea for each of seven paragraphs. There is a space provided for each main idea. When students have completed this portion, they write down what they think to be the central...

Bring the enjoyable story of Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock by Eric A. Kimmel to your young readers. After reading the story as a class, students answer questions about a reading and make a graphic organizer.  They make...

Practice makes perfect when it comes to reading fluency! Walk your emerging readers through a familiar passage, slowly pointing to each word to keep every learner with you. While looking at a projected passage, scholars read one word at...

In this identifying graphic organizers and their texts worksheet, students observe chronological, compare & contrast, sequence, cause & effect, and problem & solution graphic organizers, read short passages, and match them....

Students write sentences using different writing styles. Through peer editing, they hone their writing to create effective thesis statements. They create a glossary of text messaging terms.

Model  for your class how to make text-to-text connections by following the script presented by this resource. No specific texts are offered as examples.

Even if you've never picked up a musical instrument, chances are that music has directly impacted your mental and emotional development. Sixth graders engage in a reading activity in which they read two articles on the impact of music on...

Examine human resilience across two texts with a detailed unit. Over the course of a week, learners will conduct a close reading of excerpts from Unbroken and Farewell to Manzanar. The resource includes clear procedures for reading and...

Looking for an interesting text to share the world of microbes with your middle school classroom? The edition contains explanations, worksheets, experiments, discussions, and links to outside sources for a true and complete...

A 48-page Student Reader focuses on the Civil War. Scholars gain information from a text that explores when, why, and where the Civil War occurred, as well as important people such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Abraham...

Looking to introduce some text-based questions into your ELA lessons? Practice the kinds of skills the Common Core demands with the seven text-based questions and the essay prompt provided here. Designed to be a three-day lesson, day one...

With the Common Core State Standards' growing focus on informational text, it's the perfect time to showcase this PowerPoint to your team of teachers. It's 59 slides focus on seven best practice structures: reading-as-thinking,...

Twenty insightful questions follow a read aloud of the story, Amos and Boris by William Steig. Scholars then show what they know through completion of a cause and effect chart, reading fluency assessment, and a written...

This is a skills-based assessment that asks test takers to use textual evidence to determine the main idea of an excerpt from an informational text as well as respond to text-dependent questions. The assessment is the middle point...

Media texts convey both overt and implied messages. As part of their study of media, class members analyze the language, form, techniques, and aesthetics in a variety of media texts.

Introduce your class to encoding text. Pairs work together to create a protocol to send text prior to learning ASCII encoding. Groups then collaborate to send and translate ASCII codes creating a formatted text message. 

Are all disasters natural? Scholars reread Earthquakes! to determine what classifies these events as a natural disaster. They label earthquake facts as N for natural or D disaster to support their ideas. They then discuss academic...

Although this is part of a series, lesson plan nine has your class take a break from their close study of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) text to read the firsthand account “Teaching Nepalis to Read, Plant, and...

Ideas like this are highly effective for helping build better reading comprehension. The class listens to an excerpt from a grade-appropriate text, and they discuss what clues or words helped them visualize the scene. They then read a...

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....

Middle schoolers develop strategies for what to do when they come upon words in a text that they don't know. After a class discussion, pupils are given a selection of text that contains some very difficult words. They are instructed to...

Lesson 10 in a series of human rights lessons focuses on the skills of finding evidence and summarizing. Your young readers work to compare the two texts they have read in this unit: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...

Scanning a text before getting started is a reading strategy that your pupils can use to get a general idea about a text before diving in. Give some direction to their scanning with a worksheet that includes items to check for and space...