"How important is freedom to you and your family?" The guiding question becomes much more powerful after your class reads and responds to a passage from a historical novel. While reading the passage, they complete a graphic organizer...

What makes up a society? Read a passage about culture and community and answer five reading comprehension questions.

Help your learners work their way through a reading assignment for informational text. Using context clues, they answer five comprehension question based on a short passage about the three levels of government: local government, state...

Support your eleventh graders with a practice assessment for the Common Core tests. The practice test features a series of literary and informational passages and related multiple choice and essay questions. An online version is also...

Help your pupils take charge of their inferring abilities with an exercise designed for direct practice with making and supporting inferences. Learners read four short passages and answer two to three questions for each passage that...

See what all the buzz is about with a reading comprehension activity! Third and fourth graders read a short informational passage about bees before answering four questions about what they have learned.

As teachers, it is our job to encourage learners to stand up for what they believe in and help them learn lessons from life's events. A set of practice questions designed for the ELA MCAS assessment features passages that teach positive...

After completing a short self-assessment, partners use the provided questions and take turns acting as life coaches.

What better way to prepare your class for Common Core testing than with a practice test? The practice test includes several reading passages, both literary and informational, and learners respond to multiple choice questions...

The end of the year has arrived, which means it's time to find out exactly what your fifth graders have learned over the past few months. With the help of this Common Core-designed assessment that includes two narrative passages and...

With the end of the year quickly approaching it's time to find out exactly how much your sixth graders have learned. Specifically designed for the Common Core ELA standards, this practice test gives students five reading passages,...

“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?” Ah, the central question of Lord of the Flies. As part of their study of William Golding's riveting novel, readers complete an anticipation guide and respond to a series of survey...

Fort Sumter, the site of the Civil War's first battle, taught the Union and the Confederacy an important lesson: they would both need to take stronger steps than anticipated if they wanted to win the war. History pupils read about the...

Who was Vincent van Gogh? Most of the questions can be answered in two or three sentences; however, there is at least one essay prompt and one personal response question that require longer answers. Questions call for a good mix of...

What natural resources are available in your area? Your learners can consider this question after reading a brief passage about natural and renewable resources. After reading, class members respond to five questions related to the reading.

Don't judge a book—or a toy—by its cover. Omri, a main character in The Indian in the Cupboard, quickly judged his plastic toy figures as boring. However, once placed in the cupboard, Omri's toys became something he never imagined....

Solids, liquid, and gas, the three states of matter, are the subject of a cross-curricular reading comprehension exercise that asks kids to first read an article about these forms, and then to respond to a series of questions based on...

Rainforests are the topic of this brief reading passage. Learners can find out all about the different layers of the rainforest as well as the types of creatures that live there. After reading, they respond to five questions about the text.

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...

Invite your kids to tell all sorts of stories with this interactive app. Learners view images and record their own voices as as they create short narratives to go along with the images. The app provides plenty of...

To conclude a study of Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, class members sharpen their critical thinking skills by engaging in a Socratic seminar discussion of Martinez's novel.

Being able to recognize patterns, craft generalizations, and draw conclusions based on information in a text passage are essential critical thinking skills. Encourage learners to hone these skills with a learning exercise that asks them...

As Flora from Flora and Ulysses drowns in her misery, she discovers a squirrel with bigger problems than her own. She saves him from the vacuum cleaner and finds out that his brush with death gave him superpowers. Scholars match...

Twins always have double the fun, right? Sara, in Jacob Have I Loved, always is in the shadows of her twin sister. Scholars identify synonyms, answer comprehension questions, foreshadow, and create alliterations as they read about how...