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This lesson gives students foundational skills needed to identify the author's purpose in a variety of texts. Use the lesson as a stand alone or as a pre-lesson to What Were They Thinking?

Help your students absorb the details of a text and make inferences about what they read with the strategy of close reading. By reading closely, students will become better able to understand complex themes and nuances in a text.

This lesson helps your students practice making text connections so they can write about their reading. It can be taught on its own or serve as a precursor to the Reading Response Letters lesson.

Encourage your students to translate their understanding of theme to poetry. In this lesson, students will evaluate the theme of poems by sketching pictures and citing text evidence.

It’s time to make an educated guess! In this lesson, your students will practice using their background knowledge and evidence from the text to make inferences in nonfiction pieces about Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez.

In this lesson, students will use their creativity, a graphic organizer, and a fun story to learn about character analysis.

Improve your students' comprehension of non-fictional reading through this lesson that teaches them about text features. Students will find their own text features and explain why they aid in the reading process.

In this lesson, students will practice identifying the subject and predicate of a sentence and making predictions with textual evidence as they read short fictional texts. Use it as a stand alone lesson or as a precursor to What's Next?

Arts and crafts, Venn diagrams, and literature all come together as students compare and contrast stories. Opportunities for student creativity are endless!

In this lesson, your students will explore the library in search of various genres of nonfiction texts. Teach this lesson at the beginning of the year to familiarize your students with the structure and organization of the library.

What do Malala Yousafzai, Al Gore, and Michelle Obama all have in common? They are all nonfiction authors with a purpose. In this interactive lesson, students will gain practice looking at details in text to identify the author’s purpose.

Use this lesson to help your ELs describe a character’s emotion based on actions. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the lesson Close Reading: Reading Through Character Emotion.

Reading reflection topics like theme, problems, and solutions can be challenging concepts for young readers. Help your students make sense of these literary elements using dynamic organizers that draw comparisons between fiction texts.

This lesson helps students recognize cause-and-effect relationships in fiction and nonfiction writing by identifying clue words. It can be used on its own or as a precursor to Cause and Effect with Comic Strips.

Use this lesson to help your ELs compare and contrast supporting characters from excerpted texts. It can be a stand-alone lesson or support the lesson Understanding Character Traits, Understanding Plot Lesson Part III.

This lesson gives students practice identifying first person and third person narration in fiction and nonfiction texts. It could be taught as a stand-alone lesson or as a precursor to the lesson Fiction vs. Nonfiction.

Describe what's happening in the script! Use this lesson to help your ELs describe events in a drama. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the lesson Summer Drama.